Advertising technology was built to put a message in front of one person among millions. On Sunday, a report showed what happens when the message is not an advertisement at all. Researchers traced mercenary spyware to ads bought through ordinary programmatic channels, delivered by a company that Google and IAB Europe had both listed as a vendor for years. The rest of the day's news, from Meta's contract terms to Google's data uploads and Amazon's automated campaigns, turned on the same question: what travels through the ad system, and who checks it.
PPC Land reported on October 18 that Google drops ad vendor it listed since 2020 after 45-device spyware attack. The source is an October 15 report by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, written by Bill Marczak, Wolfie Christl, John Scott-Railton, Astrid Perry, Siena Anstis and Ron Deibert. It concludes, with what it calls high confidence, that targeted ads bought by Discover-Tech, an Israeli company, delivered spyware made by Candiru to at least 45 devices belonging to Al Jazeera staff, without the targets clicking anything. Citizen Lab calls the technique "AdFection" and describes the finding as "the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads."
Luis Rijo
The mechanics are what make the case alarming for the industry. The ads called a server that delivered malicious code only to the devices on a target list. Scanners and anyone else received an empty response of zero bytes, so automated checks found nothing. "Once the ad-banner appears on screen, the damage may already be done," said Nicole Fink of 2fink Consulting. Between March and June 2026, Discover-Tech bid on 3.77 billion impressions and won 441.95 million. Its ads ran in 75,373 apps and on 120,768 websites, and its targets were spread across 161 countries, with the most bids in Yemen, Pakistan and Montenegro. The spend for that period was about $109,091.
Discover-Tech was not an unknown operator slipping through the cracks. Google had listed it as an ad vendor since 2020, and IAB Europe had registered it as vendor 778 in the Transparency and Consent Framework from July 2, 2020. Both lists rely heavily on companies' own attestations. Google cut its access in early October, and Citizen Lab says IAB Europe followed on October 8, a removal PPC Land could not independently confirm. Several platforms paused the company. "We have paused all Discover-Tech Ltd. access while we conduct our own review," Vungle, part of Liftoff, said. Eskimi said only "a few hundred dollars" had passed through it, a figure that covers a different scope from the $109,091. The attribution to Candiru is a research finding, not a legal one, and the Trustworthy Accountability Group still listed the vendor when PPC Land published.
A court and the limits of proof
Spyware also reached a courtroom in Oakland the same weekend. PPC Land reported that WhatsApp loses contempt bid against NSO over 23 alleged spyware accounts. Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of the US District Court for the Northern District of California signed an order on October 16 refusing to hold NSO Group in contempt of the permanent injunction issued on October 18, 2025. WhatsApp had pointed to 23 new accounts and malicious URL campaigns in February and April 2026, but held back the markers it used to attribute them, to avoid revealing its detection methods to NSO.
The court would not lower the bar for it. "The court has found no lower, preliminary standard that applies to the decision to issue an order to show cause," Hamilton wrote. She also called WhatsApp's reading of the injunction, which it argued covered accounts that existed before the order, "a tortured one." The ruling does not find that NSO complied. It finds that WhatsApp did not prove otherwise to the clear-and-convincing standard. The case dates from a 2019 attack on about 1,400 devices, which led a jury to award $167.3 million in punitive damages, later cut to about $4 million, plus $444,719 in compensatory damages. Natalia K., senior tech legal counsel at Access Now, summed up the dilemma: "Requiring platforms to burn their detection methods to hold spyware makers to account isn't accountability."
The two cases share a structure. In both, the party with the evidence of abuse is a platform whose detection methods are its defence, and in both, the systems that were supposed to screen out bad actors relied on what those actors said about themselves.
Meta's clause, still there
Self-description was also the problem with Meta's contract terms, the subject of the October 17 edition. On October 17, The Verge reported that Meta had removed the sentence in its updated Commercial Terms that lets it use content crawled from business websites to train its products. PPC Land checked. In Meta's AI training clause still in Oct 30 terms after report of removal, published on October 18, it reported that Meta's UK English preview page, captured at 20:44 UTC that day, still contained the sentence word for word, about 30 hours after The Verge's report and 12 days before the terms take effect on October 30, 2026.
Meta's explanations have shifted. On October 16, spokesperson Andy Stone said the clause was about pulling "accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites." On October 17, Stone and spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge: "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." Roberts said "the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products," but no such limit appears in the preview. The terms still say nothing about robots.txt, and Meta-ExternalAgent uses one robots.txt token for both training and indexing, so a site cannot allow one and refuse the other. James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell, noted that the test credentials the clause mentions could let Meta past registration walls. PPC Land could not determine which version of the terms The Verge saw.
Data that no longer needs a disguise
Google, meanwhile, changed how advertisers hand it their customers' data. PPC Land reported that Google Ads Data Manager stops requiring hashed customer data November 16, based on an undated Google email that Anthony Higman, founder and chief executive of ADSQUIRE, posted on LinkedIn on October 18. From November 16, 2026, Data Manager will no longer require SHA-256 hashed customer data. It will accept encrypted data by default, then decrypt, normalise and match it inside a trusted execution environment. "Google Ads decrypts, normalizes, and matches this data with Google account data," the email says. The change covers CRM connections, cloud storage, file uploads and the Data Manager API, which affects Customer Match and enhanced conversions.
Google says the change will improve performance and cut formatting errors, work that moves from advertisers to Google. Hashing was never as protective as it sounded: the Federal Trade Commission warned in July 2024 that hashed data is not anonymous. But the new process means readable identifiers exist inside Google's secure environment, as PPC Land notes. The email does not say what happens to existing hashed uploads, whether the change is optional, whether Display & Video 360 and Google Analytics are covered, how the environment is attested, or how long decrypted data is kept. Google gave no match-rate figures.
Data Manager also widened in the Demand Gen campaign type. PPC News Feed reported at 03:00 UTC on October 19 that Demand Gen's data strength feature adds new metrics, including a Data Strength Uplift metric, Data Manager support for Display & Video 360 and Google Analytics, and enhanced conversions in both. "Advertisers can now leverage the Data Strength Uplift metric to gauge conversion improvements driven by their data setup," the item says. Google's own case study cites a 16% rise in conversion volume at the insurance platform The Zebra.
Measurement came to the API as well. PPC Land reported that Google Ads API v26 adds 15 Search Lift metrics to measure ad-driven searches, released on October 14 and signed by Anash P. Oommen of the Google Ads API team. The read-only Search Lift data joins Local Services Performance Max campaign creation, an optional EU political declaration for campaigns targeting only non-EU locations, five renamed hotel bid modifiers and a per-currency Demand Gen minimum budget. It is the first release under the twice-monthly cadence covered on October 17. Search Lift studies require a minimum of $10,000 in the US, and the API still cannot create them.
Bots that move
Automated traffic was the other thread. PPC Land reported that Yandex.Cloud bot traffic drops 40% as gambling bots move to other hosts, drawing on an October 14 Cloudflare analysis by Marina Elmore and Lai Yi Ohlsen. After reported Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex facilities in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir between October 7 and 11, Yandex.Cloud bot traffic fell about 40%. The bots aimed at one gambling customer did not stop. They reappeared on the Russian hosts Radist and Selectel with identical JA4 fingerprints, and Russian bot traffic to gambling accounts rose 1.4%, from 167.7 million to 170.1 million requests. "Physical infrastructure is static, but malicious automation is built to move," the authors wrote. Blocking by network or IP address misses traffic that has simply relocated, and aggregate charts made it look as if the bots had gone.
Contract, consent and AI
Rights over the content that trains AI models were contested from another angle. PPC Land reported that AI licensing fees may bypass creators, University of Amsterdam paper argues. Elena Izyumenko, assistant professor of intellectual property law at the Institute for Information Law, posted a 15-page paper on SSRN on October 16 arguing that EU-style payments for AI training may flow to publishers, labels and studios rather than to the people who made the work. She tests creators' claims under Article 15(1)(c) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. "Human rights law offers no 'magic' remuneration model," she wrote. The paper admits there is not enough evidence to estimate creator payouts and proposes no model of its own.
Google is paying for content in its own way. PPC Land reported that Google now pays 400 publications to feed AI features in Google News. On October 15, Google said more than 400 publications are paid in its News AI pilot for "enhanced content" used in article overviews and audio briefings, up from nine partners in December 2025. New names include Axios, CNN, the Financial Times, Forbes and The Washington Post. Google calls the programme worldwide, but every newly named partner is in the US or UK, the count is of publications rather than publishers, and neither payment terms nor the meaning of "enhanced content" were disclosed. "People's information habits are evolving quickly, and platforms and publishers of all sizes are navigating these changes," Google said.
The same day, Google said it is making links in its AI answers more visible. Google pushes links higher in AI answers as Preferred Sources use rises 7x, PPC Land reported, describing five changes in AI Mode and AI Overviews announced on October 15 by Hema Budaraju, vice president of product management: inline links placed higher, a test of a section for official sites, wider news carousels, larger links at the end of some answers, and a test of clickable creator names in AI Mode video results. "The number of people who now use our Preferred Sources feature has grown by more than 7x since the start of the year," Budaraju wrote, without a baseline. Google again published no click data for any of the changes.
Labelling reached music. PPC Land reported that YouTube Music labels songs made primarily with generative AI, a rollout that began on October 14. The label appears on the player page for tracks where, for example, a model produced both the composition and the vocals, and YouTube applies it using information from music partners and its own detection tools. "As these tools evolve, our listeners have told us they want transparency when they're hearing an AI-generated track," YouTube said. The company describes the threshold as "primarily" in one place and "significant role" in another, and has published no accuracy figures or appeal process. Deezer receives about 75,000 AI tracks a day, more than 44% of its daily deliveries.
Apple tightened its rules on AI imagery. PPC Land reported on October 18 that Apple's App Store rules now require apps to remove AI intimate imagery. Guidelines revised on October 16 name nonconsensual intimate imagery in guideline 1.2, add guideline 2.5.19 against hidden or dormant features, and remove apps that enable trafficking or child exploitation from alternative distribution as well. The changes follow pressure from San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu over AI "nudify" apps. "We do not hesitate to remove apps, and terminate the developers behind them, when they violate these guidelines," Apple said, citing more than 150,000 apps blocked last year. The same revision carried a rule aimed at advertisers: Apple's rule 2.3.14 bans discount prices in App Store creative assets, PPC Land reported, covering the creative assets that appear in search and product page headers when they launch with iOS 27. Apple's safety post covered only three of the seven changes.
Google's own content rules became more explicit. PPC Land reported that Google spells out what counts as sexually suggestive in Google Ads, after an October 14 rewrite of the sexual content policy that adds "strongly" and "moderately restricted" tiers and six subsections of examples. Such ads can run only on the Search Network. All sexual content is now blocked in 20 countries and strongly restricted content in 14 more, up from 19 and 12 reported in September 2025, without explanation. "This does not change enforcement of the policy," Google said. PPC News Feed's update to the sexual content policy on October 18 described the same clarification.
Machines that run locally
One AI partnership kept data off the network entirely. PPC Land reported that Apple and Meta team up to run Meta's 816B Muse model on two Mac Studios. Mark Zuckerberg announced on October 15 that Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model with 816 billion parameters and 42 billion active per token, "runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple." Apple chief executive John Ternus replied that the "Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!" The model runs across two linked 512GB machines using Apple's M5 Ultra chip and MLX framework. Running locally means Meta receives no user data. No financial terms were disclosed, and nothing was said about Siri or the iPhone.
Amazon's automated buying
The largest cluster of Sunday's stories concerned Amazon, and most of them asked how much control advertisers keep. PPC Land reported that Amazon's $100-a-day Full-Funnel campaigns hand targeting to AI, ADOTAT says. At unBoxed on September 29, Amazon retired the Amazon DSP name and launched Amazon Ads Agent, DVA+ and Full-Funnel Campaigns. ADOTAT's October 1 column, by Pesach Lattin and its staff, argues that the most automated tier is already live for US advertisers at a $100 daily minimum, about $3,000 a month, while DVA+, which keeps manual controls, remains in closed beta until an open beta expected in late October. "Defaults are destiny," the column says. Kelly MacLean, vice president of engineering, science and product at Amazon Ads, said: "With DVA+, we have brought the power of programmatic to advertisers of all sizes." PPC Land notes that the targeting claim in the headline is an argument about defaults, not a documented removal.
Amazon's own advice raised its own questions. Amazon Ad Lab names four bidding metrics but publishes no test results, PPC Land reported. An October 15 video compares fixed and dynamic up-and-down bidding for Sponsored Products with a hypothetical example and no experiment data, concluding that "neither strategy is universally better." Up-and-down bidding can raise bids by up to 100%, and placement adjustments by up to 900%. The context is the FTC and 22 states' lawsuit, filed on August 31, 2026, alleging about $20 billion in hidden surcharges and claiming the share of clicks charged at the full bid rose from about 4% in late 2020 to 79.1% in 2024. The video had 55 views.
In India, the numbers did not add up. PPC Land reported that Amazon Ads' ₹15,000 starter budget falls short of its ₹500-a-day advice. An October 14 Hinglish video tells new sellers to run campaigns for 45 to 60 days at about ₹500 a day before judging them, which comes to ₹22,500 to ₹30,000, then says the cost is ₹15,000, enough for about 30 days. Amazon's March 2025 guidance had said 30 days. "Amazon Ad campaigns ko 1 hafte mein judge mat karo," the narrator says: do not judge campaigns in a week.
Agencies are building on Amazon's data. PPC Land reported that Nectar indexes 6,728 Amazon audience segments to steer search bids. The New York Amazon agency's Customer Atlas, released on October 14, scores a brand's purchase history against 5,268 in-market and 1,460 lifestyle segments, then uses boost and suppression lists as bid modifiers in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. "The question was never which keywords to buy," said Youval Peltier, chief strategy officer. Nectar says CPC fell by a third in one deployment, but a low base bid would lower average CPC by design, and Amazon has offered audience bid boosts since October 2024. Free querying of first-party Amazon Marketing Cloud features ends on December 31, 2026.
Amazon also extended its reach into conversations. PPC Land reported that Amazon's $74.99 Bee wearable can turn spoken items into homepage picks. Bee Frontier, a wrist or clip device announced on October 15, summarises conversations, and linking it to Amazon.com turns items mentioned aloud into homepage recommendations, a feature that requires Bee Pro at $11.99 a month. "No audio is ever stored. Audio is processed into insights in real time and deleted after processing," Amazon says. The announcement also says no one, including Amazon, can access the data, yet Amazon.com receives recommendations drawn from it. The device is sold only in the US.
The holiday push continued. Amazon cuts beauty prices up to 40% in flash deals, above its 30% headline, PPC Land reported. The sixth Holiday Beauty Event runs from October 19 to November 1 under an "up to 30% off" banner, while five of its seven 48-hour flash windows go up to 40% and two to 35%. "Every discount figure in the announcement is a ceiling," PPC Land noted. Simon-Kucher found that only 22% of shoppers believe discounts reflect real savings, down from 46%.
Uber's audiences moved off its apps. PPC Land reported that TripleLift wins first US deal to sell Uber audiences outside Uber's apps, announced on October 13. Buyers can reach Uber ride, delivery and shopping audiences through private marketplace deals across TripleLift's display, native and online video inventory without a separate data contract. "Commerce media shouldn't stop at the edge of an app," said Dave Helmreich, TripleLift's chief executive. The "first" is narrower than it sounds: Uber audiences already reached Meta and Google Shopping through a pilot that began on June 15.
B2B data and its sellers
In B2B marketing, the platforms selling data also told the success stories. PPC Land reported that LinkedIn says Zembl won 82% more ABM budget after rebuilding attribution. A September 30 customer story by Greg Willis, LinkedIn's vice president of global sales, credits the Australian energy broker's 3.2x rise in "revenue influence" and 104% more qualified leads to connecting LinkedIn's Company Intelligence and Conversions APIs to its CRM through Factors.ai. "And this all came from improving their attribution tracking," the post says. LinkedIn sells the ads, owns the data feeds and wrote the story, and the post gives no baseline, period or attribution model.
Salesforce chose a data partner for its sales agent. PPC Land reported that Salesforce's Hunter agent gets Demandbase intent data with no extra contract, in a release issued on October 15. Hunter, still in pilot with general availability planned later this year, will draw Demandbase engagement, account, buying-group and intent data through Demandbase's MCP server. "Sales teams can only act on the signals they can see," said Rohan Punamia, vice president of product management at Salesforce. No additional contract does not mean no additional cost, and data scope, consent and retention were not addressed.
SerpApi published another research recipe. PPC Land reported that a SerpApi script tags 38% of to-do app complaints as missing features. The October 16 guide by Emirhan Akdeniz and Corbin Davenport combines SerpApi's App Store APIs with two open-source Hugging Face models to sort negative competitor reviews into seven categories. In a "to do list" run, incompleteness accounted for 38.16% of complaints and advertising for 1.67%. The guide gives no sample size or accuracy data, and its code does not sort reviews by "mostcritical" as the text says. Google's lawsuit against SerpApi continues, after a court dismissed the original complaint on July 20, 2026.
Meta made its own survey case for AI. PPC Land reported that a Meta survey finds 76% of APAC small business owners say AI lifts productivity. The YouGov poll of 3,983 owners in nine markets, carried out between August 6 and September 2, found 84% using AI and 86% wanting more guidance. "In other words, small businesses have adopted AI - what they're asking for now is help using it well," Meta wrote. The results are self-reported, the base for the 76% is not stated, and Meta says the sample is not nationally representative.
The FTC closed a refund. PPC Land reported that the FTC sends $9.8 million to 65,022 Walmart wire transfer scam victims, mailing checks from October 15 under Walmart's $10 million settlement of June 2025 over scammers using its money transfer services. The average is about $151 per recipient, checks must be cashed within 90 days, and the gap of up to $200,000 against the settlement is unexplained.
Search, tested in small ways
Google's search team explained a small signal. PPC Land reported that Google says URL keywords become irrelevant once a page has content, from the first episode of "The Non-Canonical Cabinet", published on October 14. "It is an incredibly small signal. It really only matters when we have absolutely nothing else to go on," said Gary Illyes, a Google Search developer advocate, alongside Cherry Prommawin. Emoji are barred from domain names but allowed in paths. The video's guidance on encoding differs from Google's documentation, which tells sites to percent-encode their own links.
Ad formats kept shifting in tests that PPC News Feed logged on October 18. Google is testing sitelinks with a domain path and favicon, spotted by Arpan Banerjee, and a dotted underline in Search ads, spotted by Sachin Patel and Adriaan Dekker. Bing is testing sitelinks with arrow buttons, white arrows inside shadowed rectangles. Google Ads now lets advertisers scan another website or social profile for image assets when building ads. And PPC News Feed reported that AI Max auto-upgrades were spotted in Google Ad Grants accounts, where some nonprofits found AI Max for Search switched on without opting in, as Dan Kabakov noted on LinkedIn.
Audiences, counted and courted
Charts showed how global rankings can hide where audiences are. PPC Land reported that Turkish girl group manifest debuts at No. 4 on YouTube with 27.3M views, in the chart week ending October 15. "TRALALA" drew 27,318,613 views, and 85.2% of them came from Türkiye's own chart, against 4.2% from the 15 other national charts PPC Land tracks. Taylor Swift's "Patient Zero" fell to No. 98.
In Poland, linear television reclaimed time. PPC Land reported that YouTube drops to 2.3% of Polish TV time as streaming slips from record, using Nielsen's Gauge for September 2026. Streaming fell from a record 11.0% to 10.4%, YouTube from 2.8% to 2.3% and Netflix from 1.9% to 1.5%, while cable took 38.6% as autumn schedules and volleyball returned. "The main driver of this trend proved to be traditional television, especially cable TV," Nielsen said.
Broadcasters are consolidating in response to global streamers. PPC Land reported that global streamers push TV into M&A from Sky-ITV to RTL, a Rakuten TV exec says, from an October 14 ExchangeWire interview with Stuart Keith, vice president of global ad strategy and partnerships at Rakuten TV Enterprise, recorded at ATS London. Sky's deal for ITV's broadcast unit is worth up to £1.6 billion, and RTL paid €150 million in cash for Sky Deutschland. Global streamers' share of UK creative and entertainment revenue rose from 22% to 42% between 2014 and 2024. Keith's figure of "160 billion devices" is implausible, and the interview did not test his claims.
Creators are choosing platforms over studios. PPC Land reported that Lilly Singh returns to YouTube sketches after Hollywood's 'too niche' notes, from an October 15 interview on YouTube's official blog. Singh, a former NBC late-night host with 14.2 million subscribers, said Hollywood notes pushed her towards "more palatable" work. "That is fundamentally anti-creative," she said. "YouTube's superpower is global distribution." The interview was published by YouTube, which has an interest in the story.
Brands are turning events into participation. Brittaney Kiefer reported for Adweek on October 18 that, amid its turnaround, Victoria's Secret is turning its fashion show into a fan movement. The Los Angeles show that Sunday added ticket drops, an episodic series called "Angels Among Us" following a search for a new Angel, a global stream on YouTube and the brand's first post-show TikTok Live. It is the second show under chief marketing and customer officer Elizabeth Preis, who joined in May 2025 and wanted it to be "much more participatory as a night of fun and friendship."
Google, finally, sold its old phones again. PPC Land reported that Google adds refurbished Pixel 9 phones at up to 45% off in the US, with a one-year warranty, announced for International Repair Day on October 15 by Steven Nickel, director of operations. "Our devices should be built to last - and easy to repair when life happens," Google said. It gave no refurbished prices and no baseline for the discount.
The common thread
Sunday's news kept returning to what passes through advertising systems unchecked. A vendor listed on the strength of its own word delivered spyware through ordinary auctions. A court would not act on evidence WhatsApp would not show. Meta's contract still says what its spokespeople say it does not. Google will decrypt customer data that advertisers used to disguise, and bots that lost their host simply moved. Amazon's defaults, Google's labels and LinkedIn's case studies each ask buyers to trust the party that controls the data. The systems are getting faster at placing a message in front of one person. The checks on who is sending it have not kept pace.
By the numbers
441.95 million
Impressions Discover-Tech won between March and June 2026, before Google cut it off.
Google drops ad vendor it listed since 2020 after 45-device spyware attack
November 16
Date Google Ads Data Manager starts accepting encrypted, unhashed customer data by default.
Google Ads Data Manager stops requiring hashed customer data November 16
6,728
Amazon audience segments Nectar's Customer Atlas scores a brand's purchase history against.
Nectar indexes 6,728 Amazon audience segments to steer search bids
85.2%
Share of manifest's global YouTube views for "TRALALA" that came from Türkiye's own chart.
Turkish girl group manifest debuts at No. 4 on YouTube with 27.3M views
$9.8 million
Refunds the FTC is mailing to 65,022 people scammed through Walmart's wire transfer services.
FTC sends $9.8 million to 65,022 Walmart wire transfer scam victims
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