Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world.
This week.. Facebook copied email contacts of 1.5 million users, FCC Chief Moves to Deny China Mobile’s Bid to Enter U.S., Fraudulent apps surge 159% as mobile ad spending rises and much more.
Facebook copied email contacts of 1.5 million users
BBC
Facebook “unintentionally” uploaded the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users without asking permission to do so, the social network has admitted. The data harvesting happened via a system used to verify the identity of new members. Facebook asked new users to supply the password for their email account, and took a copy of their contacts.
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FCC Chief Moves to Deny China Mobile’s Bid to Enter U.S.
Bloomberg
The top U.S. communications regulator urged the rejection of China Mobile Ltd.’s application to provide telecommunications services in the American market, opening another front in the trade fight between the world’s biggest economies.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said Wednesday he was scheduling a vote May 9 on a measure to deny the application of China Mobile USA, described as a Delaware-registered subsidiary that is indirectly controlled by the Chinese government, on national security grounds.
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T-Mobile’s Next Big Move Is… a Checking Account?
Gizmodo
While it’s not quite a pivot, it seems more and more tech companies are straying out of their lane and into the finance world. T-Mobile has decided to join the collection of startups and legacy tech players that want to handle your banking with a new checking account product simply called T-Mobile Money.
Of course, checking accounts aren’t new, and technically neither is T-Mobile Money, as it’s been in available since it soft launched late last year. But today marks its official rollout and with it, T-Mobile is looking to upgrade the traditional checking account by offering its customers a four percent interest rate on the first $3,000 in their account, with a one percent return on anything above that.
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Fraudulent apps surge 159% as mobile ad spending rises, study says
Mobile Marketer
Mobile advertising continues to surge, but unfortunately, that growth has invited fraudulent activity that robs advertisers of their media spend. Mobile ad spend is forecast to reach $87 billion this year, making up more than two-thirds of the overall U.S. digital ad market of $129.3 billion, researcher eMarketer forecast. As DoubleVerify stresses in its statement, it’s “critical” for brands to understand the risks that fraud presents and allocate appropriate resources to safeguard their digital investments.
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Mozilla wants Apple to change users’ iPhone advertiser ID every month
Zdnet
Mozilla has launched a petition today to get Apple to rotate the IDFA unique identifier of iOS users every month. The purpose of this request is to prevent online advertisers from creating profiles that contain too much information about iOS users.
IDFA stands for “IDentifier For Advertisers” and is a per-device unique ID. Apps running on a device can request access to this ID and relay the number to advertising SDKs/partners they use to show ads to their users.
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5G speed is about more than just consumer appetite for data
Telecoms.com
It’s becoming increasingly accepted that 5G will be deployed faster than any other generation of mobile technology, but consumer demand is only part of the equation.
Many will point to the insatiable appetite for data as the driving force. Telcos are of course under pressure to deliver the promised, and much hyped, era of ubiquitous connectivity, but the demanding nature of the consumer is only part of the equation.
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Facebook, PayPal and how blockchain could disrupt the payments space
Mobile Payments Today
Blockchain adoption has recently gotten a major boost — not just through traditional players in the banking world such as Chase, but also through social media. Facebook has been rapidly assembling a blockchain team tasked to work with the nascent technology. It also recently opened a position for a blockchain lawyer to help potential business partners. The social media giant is also looking for venture capital firms to invest up to $1 billion in its blockchain project, according to a report by Fortune.
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Smarter thinking about mobile ticketing
Arts Professional
It wasn’t that long ago that smartphones were a novelty. In fact, just seven years ago only half of the UK adult population had a smartphone, according to Consultancy.uk. By 2017 that number had risen to 85%, and we can assume that it is beyond 90% today.
And yet much of the ticketing approach in arts organisations across the country has failed to keep up. It’s time that these organisations start to think seriously about how the smartphone can have an impact on both ticket purchasing and the event experience.
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Pinterest and Instagram drives highest average order value on social media
Mobile Marketing Magazine
Social media platforms Instagram and Pinterest offer marketers the highest average order value (AOV) compared to Facebook and Snapchat despite delivering smaller amounts of traffic.
The study, by e-commerce platform Nosto, which tracked the source of 1.19bn visits on mobile and orders from fashion retailers with annual sales of $50m or more, found that paid social delivered a higher AOV compared to organic search results.
The data found there was a large gap between the AOV on paid and unpaid media for Pinterest and Instagram but the gap on the Facebook platform was much smaller.
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