If you feel like Internet ads are more pervasive and invasive than ever before, you’re not alone. Author Tim Wu tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the Web has gotten worse over the years, not better — and unrelenting ads are to blame.

“I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems,” Wu says. “It’s amazing that we’ve got this great scientific invention, the Web and the Internet, and then it has come to the point where using it reminds me of swatting mosquitoes.”

As a professor at Columbia Law School, Wu became known as an open Internet advocate who is credited with coining the term “net neutrality.” His new book, The Attention Merchants, examines how advertising has changed the Internet — and how those changes affect us.

He says the book was inspired by his own experience of sitting down to look something up on the computer and finding, four hours later, that he had slid into a world of digital distraction. “It’s what I call the casino effect,” Wu says. “It’s this effort of the environment to make you lose control of your sense of time and your attention kind of gets dragged away.”

Wu points out that much of the “free” content on the Internet comes at a price to users, who are subjected to ads that are targeted specifically at them and which are increasingly difficult to ignore or close. “Google, Facebook, Twitter — the whole set of companies essentially knows all your weaknesses and essentially how to manipulate you in subtle ways in order to have you do things you might not otherwise do,” he says.

Wu says that although the Internet is full of “clickbait that brings ads along like a bad cold,” it doesn’t have to be that way. “We can have a better Web,” he says. “Whether it’s a combination of subscription models or nonprofit models, I would like to have a Web that we feel proud of, that lives up to its promise.”

Interview Highlights

On the quest for clicks

It’s inherent to the business model. It’s very driven with the need to grow, to get more clicks and clicks and clicks. And some of this book is about the history, and we often say that ratings kind of ruined television in the 1950s, well, the quest for ratings looks dignified in comparison to the quest for clicks.

So much engineering talent and ability has gone into trying to make people click on things that I think we’ve almost lost the last five years of development. It’s been very disappointing.

On how we are used to content being free

It’s a bargain with some historical precedent. I think back starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads. …

This attention-merchant model has spread to so many areas of our life, where we’re completely used to everything being free. But then the payoff, or the exchange, is that then we also agree to stuff that is compromised, because it is always trying to get us to click on ads at the same time. So we have this bargain that we made — and you can call it Faustian, you can call it whatever you want — that we have decided that we have to have everything for free, and I think we’re starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.

On the price of “free” Internet content

If you really want change in this area, and you want to act, you probably have to pay for stuff, pay for content. Some people are like, “Oh my God I have to pay?” But people do pay. They pay for Netflix, they pay for HBO, they pay for other types — they subscribe to newspapers sometimes.

Generally speaking, when you pay for stuff it has more of your interests at heart. … In other words, a lot of the websites are always serving two masters, they’re both trying to get you entertained enough to stay there, or to click on things, but to also then make it a good platform for advertising. So I have sort of a plea to people who want to change these sort of things is, like, maybe just suck it up and start paying for more stuff.

On the pervasiveness of Internet advertising

In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries, we had spaces that ads didn’t leave, they stayed where they were on the page, they didn’t float around over the text, and we’re sort of lost on the Internet.

We don’t have any barriers. We have a demand for growth that is insistent, and so advertising just keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It doesn’t have any natural limit, and we haven’t found a place for the limit.

On Google’s approach to advertising

I think Google is the most profitable attention merchant in the history of the world. … They started a very idealistic beautiful company in many ways, but they didn’t have a business model.

The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising and in fact, they wrote this paper in the ’90s, saying in its appendix that any advertising-based search engine would always be corrupted and unable to serve its highest purposes, because advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid to be there.

Google is this conflicted company. I think they thought they could do this deal and keep advertising at bay, but I think year in, year out Google is starting to get worse instead of better. … You can see it with Google Maps, you can see it with Google Directions where somehow Uber is always one of the options, and it’s becoming exactly what they said was what they never wanted, which is a pay-for service where the highest bidder gets the best results. So it’s kind of a cautionary tale.

I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.

On how advertisers can use technology to target individual “moments”

I think this is going to become more intense in the coming decade as we start to carry more and more technology with us. We already have our phones, but other wearables and those technologies are going to want to know when you’re deciding things and then offer some kind of input, subtle or less so, on that moment.

So you know, discovering the moment: Let’s say you’re someone’s phone and you notice that your owner is drinking coffee at certain times of the day, just very subtly indicating where the local coffee shop is, which happens to have paid whoever makes your phone, at the right moment. … We are possibly facing little tiny bits of manipulation in all of our waking hours, if we don’t have that already.

On how Facebook “likes” help advertisers

Every time you click on a “like” button on another site, you’ve told Facebook that you’re doing that, and so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is. When you decide to “like” something you may feel you’re innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you’re delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that you essentially like to be advertised to by this company.

It’s so funny that the Internet has become a series of traps where you do innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference — “I like this thing” — and therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences. That’s what you’re doing, you’re signaling who you are as a consumer.

On what can happen when Internet companies know intimate details about individuals

I’m concerned with our autonomy. … I particularly don’t like it when it’s used to exploit your weaknesses or make you lose control in some ways — so it’s like advertising casinos to people who have gambling problems, or just things that are too sensitive — if you have a disease and suddenly you started getting ads for cures for that disease, it’s an embarrassing disease. All that kind of stuff, it just gets into that zone of autonomy or privacy where you feel a sense of freedom to be who you want to be, and I’m afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring, because you’re afraid to express yourself.

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Law enforcement is increasingly worried about losing access to powerful tools for searching social media because of changing attitudes at the social media companies that allow the searches.

Earlier this week, Facebook and Twitter restricted the bulk data access to users’ information for a company called Geofeedia, after the ACLU of Northern California published a report revealing that Geofeedia had suggested to police departments that they could use the service to track protests.

Social media monitoring services such as Geofeedia rely on bulk data access to be able to search far larger volumes of social media posts, and more efficiently, than the average user. It’s the kind of large-scale social media analysis that’s mainly used by commercial clients, such as marketers, but which has also been sold to law enforcement agencies.

The social media posts being scanned are public, but the ACLU’s Nicole Ozer says the practice is still an invasion of privacy, because of the sheer scale.

“Many of these police departments are actually surveilling entire communities,” Ozer says. That’s a reference to the services’ ability to pinpoint social media posts by location — although most people don’t enable location tagging on their social media, and wouldn’t be subject to this kind of “geo-fencing.”

Still, services such as Geofeedia can comb through and analyze vast numbers of public social media posts, which can sometimes allow police to track someone down, even if that person isn’t visible online.

Recently, police in Texas used social media to locate a teenage girl who had run away after stealing her father’s handgun and car, says Nick Selby, a police detective there.

“What we had to do is look for her in the traffic of other people talking with her or about her,” Selby says.

Signs of restricting access

It’s easier to cast a wide net like that with a social media monitoring service such as Geofeedia. But in recent months, these tools have become less available to police.

Twitter, in particular, appears to be getting more restrictive. Not only did it cut off Geofeedia’s access to bulk data following the ACLU report, earlier this year it quietly cut off data to another company, Dataminr, because it provided deep searches of public Twitter feeds to U.S. intelligence agencies.

The same thing may now be happening to companies that provide searches to law enforcement. Selby, the detective in Texas, says the change has affected the social media search abilities at his disposal.

“I have had to re-work tools to emulate the [bulk data stream] from Twitter, and scrape the public Twitter feeds of people of interest because we can no longer buy this from a lot of the vendors who used to have it,” he says.

A spokesman for Twitter would not say whether the company has changed its policy toward searches by law enforcement; in an email, a spokesman pointed NPR to the company’s guidelines for developers (that is, companies such as Geofeedia that use Twitter data). The guidelines bar search companies from allowing law enforcement agencies to use the data to “investigate, track or surveil Twitter’s users (…) in a manner that would require a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process or that would otherwise have the potential to be inconsistent with our users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.”

But that policy is very much open to interpretation, because police don’t usually need legal orders to search public social media, and it’s arguable whether such searches violate users’ “expectation of privacy.”

The ACLU’s Ozer believes it does, and that privacy laws need to catch up.

“There’s a difference between posting something online, and thinking that that information is going to end up in a huge database that the police are going to be able to search through at any time for any reason,” Ozer says.

Tide turns amid fears of surveillance

If Twitter has decided to cut off law enforcement, it would represent a dramatic change. In recent years, several data analytics companies have openly marketed Twitter-based search tools to law enforcement, with no complaints from the social media company itself — at least, not in public.

Now some people inside policing believe the climate has turned against them. A few departments have tried to address fears of surveillance by establishing internal rules to make sure officers don’t search social media “at any time for any reason,” as Ozer put it.

The police department in Dunwoody, Ga., for instance, requires officers to get their social media searches approved ahead of time by a supervisor.

“So you can’t target particular groups, or classes of people, or different ideologies,” says Chief Billy Grogan.

But rules like this have been slow to catch on. Most police departments don’t restrict social media searches, in part because it doesn’t occur to police that they shouldn’t be searching public data the same way a marketing company does.

That freedom may now be at risk, as companies such as Twitter feel pressure from activist groups such as the ACLU to turn off the data tap.

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In the early nineties, Subaru was in trouble. The cars were fine. They ran well enough. But sales had been slumping for years. Subaru was up against giants like Toyota and Nissan. And it was losing. It needed a way to stand out.

Subaru hired a new ad agency, to figure out who was buying their cars. The ad firm went out to Northampton, Massachusetts—a hotspot for Subaru sales, according to their research. A group of Subaru owners filed into a little room in a shopping mall to answer a few questions, and the researchers noticed something right away. All of them were women and many identified as lesbian.

This wasn’t a time of tolerance for LGBT Americans. It was the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In a few years, Bill Clinton would sign the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred same sex couples from being recognized as spouses. And yet, Subaru executives signed off on ads aimed at lesbian consumers. They did it in very precise, clever ways that became a template for many of the ad campaigns you see today… if you know how to look for it.

Music: “Good For Nothin” and “Evergreen High.” Find us: Twitter/Facebook

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The U.S. Treasury Department issued rules Thursday aimed at stemming the practice of “tax inversions.” This is the practice where a company moves its legal home abroad in order to avoid or minimize U.S. taxes.

Bloomberg has a helpful explainer of inversions.

The rules are meant to stem a technique, used after a company moves its legal address to a low-tax country, called earnings stripping. When the company moves abroad or gains a foreign corporate parent, the company minimizes its U.S. taxes by receiving a loan from the foreign-based company and paying deductible interest to that foreign parent or affiliate.

This technique means a company can generate large interest deductions without having to invest in the United States. Getting at this lost tax revenue has been a priority of the Obama administration.

The rules limit those loans that leave the U.S. company owing less to the Treasury. The rules were proposed in April, but have been softened in part because of opposition from business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber reiterated its objections in a statement:

“The U.S. Chamber had significant concerns about the impacts of these rules when proposed, and we’re still examining this final rule. While it appears that Treasury may have attempted to address at least some of the Chamber’s concerns, we continue to believe punitive, one-off changes to the tax law do nothing to address the root of the purported “inversion problem”: our antiquated and anticompetitive (sic) tax code. If we are seeking to make the United States a competitive place to do business, we need to focus on achieving comprehensive tax reform.”

The Chamber had filed suit after the rules were announced. One of the main complaints is that the changes hamper a company’s ability to manage its finances.

The New York Times reports the changes to the tax rules, even their suggestion, had immediate consequences.

“The Treasury’s rules in April also took aim at the $152 billion deal between Pfizer and Allergan. The Treasury prohibited what it called “serial inverters,” or companies that have completed three or more deals with American companies over a short period of time. That broke up the merger between the two pharmaceutical giants, given that Allergan was the product of multiple levels of inversions.

“Thursday’s changes provided exemptions for cash pools and short-term loans, which are used by multinational companies to move cash among their subsidiaries across the world.

“It also said that the regulations made special exceptions of types of entities, including foreign subsidiaries of American corporations, S Corporations, regulated financial and insurance companies and mutual funds and real estate investment trusts. The amendments also made exceptions for ordinary business transactions, such as purchasing stock as part of compensation plans.”

The Associated Press reported on congressional reaction to the new Treasury Department rule changes.

“Republicans quickly criticized the rules. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, warned they “could jeopardize American businesses and the U.S. economy.”

“But Democrats countered.

” ‘If Republicans are serious about reforming our tax code and making it fairer for all Americans,’ said Michigan Rep. Sander Levin, top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, ‘they should begin by joining with Democrats to pass legislation to close corporate tax loopholes.’ “

Here’s a fact sheet from the Treasury Department about changes to the regulations.

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Samsung Electronics profits estimate took a hit, on news it was discontinuing its flagship phone. The company says it is adjusting its earning and cutting its operating profit by $2.3 billion. That’s after Samsung ended production of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. A number of the phones overheated causing fires just months after it was launched.

The company said on its website was asking all carrier and partners to cease selling or exchanging the phones.

“Samsung is working with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to investigate the recently reported cases involving the Galaxy Note7. While the investigation is taking place, Samsung is asking all carrier and retail partners here and around the globe to stop sales and exchanges of the Galaxy Note7. Since the affected devices can overheat and pose a safety risk, we are asking consumers with an original Galaxy Note7 or a replacement Galaxy Note7 to power it down and contact the carrier or retail outlet where you purchased your Galaxy Note7. If you bought your Galaxy Note7 from Samsung.com or have questions, you should contact us at 1-844-365-6197 and we can help you.”

The company is sending fire-resistant packages to its U.S. customers as a precaution. Samsung said the packing materials conform with government requirements for shipping lithium-ion batteries. Samsung is expecting 1.5 million returned phones from the U.S and South Korea.

In its haste to tamp down talk of phones that explode, the company made its recall even before knowing the cause, reports The New York Times:

Scotching the Note 7 does not end the questions facing Samsung. It still has not disclosed what specifically caused the Note 7s to smoke and catch fire — or even whether it knows what the problem was. And the company may face questions about the safety of its other products, such as kitchen appliances and washing machines.

Samsung has received at least 92 reports of Note 7 batteries overheating in the United States, with 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, according to information posted by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. The agency is now working on a potential second recall of the Note 7s, this time focused on the devices that Samsung had shipped to replace the original smartphones.

Some Samsung front-loading washers were recalled in September.

It’s unclear what the company will do without its flagship phone. Mobile accounts for nearly half of Samsung’s revenue. Getting rid of the Galaxy Note 7 will hurt the 70-year-old tech conglomerate eventually. The company recently saw near-record stock prices last year in part because of its diversification. Samsung has a stake in fashion, medicine, hotels, oil and other industries.

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Cable giant Comcast Corp. has been ordered by federal regulators to pay $2.3 million for wrongfully charging customers for gear and services they never requested. Officials say it is the largest civil penalty imposed on a cable operator.

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission ordered Comcast to pay the fine after investigating complaints that some customers were charged for equipment such as set-top boxes, and services such as premium channels even after they had specifically rejected offers from Comcast representatives.

That practice, known as “negative option billing,” is illegal under federal law.

The fine was announced in a statement issued by the chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the FCC, Travis LeBlanc.

“It is basic that a cable bill should include charges only for services and equipment ordered by the customer—nothing more and nothing less. We expect all cable and phone companies to take responsibility for the accuracy of their bills and to ensure their customers have authorized any charges,” said LeBlanc.

The company agreed to make it easier for customers to know what equipment or services are on their account and to simplify the process for disputing charges.

Comcast acknowledged that “in the past, our customer service should have been better and our bills clearer, and that customers have at times been unnecessarily frustrated or confused.”

But in a statement, the company defended itself saying that the FCC “found no problematic policy or intentional wrongdoing, but just isolated errors or customer confusion.”

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Updated 9:50 p.m. ET with FAA statement

There’s more bad news for Samsung Electronics as the South Korean company was trying to solve the problem of its flagship Galaxy Note 7 smartphone catching fire. Samsung, the global leader in smartphone production, announced that it is suspending sales of the smartphone after reports that some replacement devices were also spontaneously igniting.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a statement advising “all consumers who own a Samsung Galaxy Note7 to power them down and stop charging or using the device.”

NPR’s Aarti Shahani reports on All Things Considered:

“Samsung is being squishy on the details. Samsung says in a statement that ‘we are readjusting our supply,’ without specifying if it’s [the] supply of batteries or another phone part.”

The New York Times reported that the company hoped to provide an update within a month.

“Samsung made the decision to halt production for consumer safety reasons and in cooperation with the authorities in the United States and China, according to the person familiar with the process.”

The news comes after Samsung announced last month that it would recall 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 smartphones amid reports that batteries were overheating and were a safety risk. The company reportedly changed battery suppliers, but that doesn’t appear to have solved the problem. Last week, a Samsung Note 7 began smoking on a Southwest Airlines flight, prompting an evacuation of the plane. The phone was reported by the owner to be a replacement phone.

The four top U.S. telecom companies, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have announced that they will no longer sell the replacement version of the Note 7. All four are offering to replace existing Note 7 phones.

Australia’s top three telecoms—Telstra, Optus and Vodafone Australia—also announced that they would no longer ship the Note 7.

The Federal Aviation Administration warns travelers that even powered-down Note 7s should not be placed in checked baggage.

Among technology publications and writers, the question now is, how much damage will the battery malfunction do to Samsung’s reputation?

The chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, Jan Dawson told Wired:

“This is the worst-case scenario for Samsung. Now that the replacement devices seem to be having the same problems, it calls into question Samsung’s whole product testing methodology and its scrutiny of its suppliers. That’s much worse than a one-off.”

Others are comparing the Samsung’s problems with another infamous product failure.

Here’s what the chairman of Reputation Management Consultants, Eric Schifffer told Reuters:

“If the Note 7 is allowed to continue it could lead to the single greatest act of brand self-destruction in the history of modern technology. Samsung needs to take a giant write-down and cast the Note 7 to the engineering hall of shame next to the Ford Pinto.”

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Excerpts from speeches Hillary Clinton was paid to give to big banks suggest a relationship with Wall Street that is a lot more familiar and pragmatic than the fiery rhetoric she has sometimes used on the campaign trail.

“I represented all of you for eight years. I had great relations and worked so close together after 9/11 to rebuild downtown, and a lot of respect for the work you do and the people who do it,” she told a Goldman Sachs symposium on Oct. 24, 2013.

But in transcript of her comments, found in an email included in a release by WikiLeaks on Friday, Clinton went on to say that the financial crisis had demonstrated the importance of bank regulation: “I think that when we talk about the regulators and the politicians, the economic consequences of bad decisions back in ’08, you know, were devastating, and they had repercussions throughout the world.”

NPR has not verified and the Clinton campaign has not confirmed the authenticity of the emails. But the campaign has not disputed the veracity of some contents that have been widely reported.

In another speech, to a San Diego law firm, the former secretary of state praised some of the people she knew on Wall Street, but also said she wasn’t afraid to work against their interests: “When I was a senator from New York, I represented and worked with so many talented, principled people who made their living in finance. But even though I represented them and did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay.”

The excerpts were contained in an email to Clinton staffers from campaign research director Tony Carrk. The speeches were delivered after she resigned as secretary of state but before she started her presidential campaign.

Clinton’s relationship with Wall Street was an ongoing issue during her long primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who frequently excoriated her for making lucrative speeches to banks and taking donations from them. He also frequently called on her to release transcripts of her speeches, which she has refused to do.

“To a significant degree, her campaign is funded by Wall Street and big money interests,” Sanders told CNN in an interview last February.

A report published in July by the Center for Responsive Politics said donors from the “securities and investment industry” have given nearly $40 million to the Clinton campaign and pro-Clinton superPACs, more than any other industry. But the report also said most of that money had come from a very few liberal donors.

CNN reported in February that the Clintons had delivered 729 speeches from February 2001 until May 2015, receiving an average of $210,795 for each address. They also reported “at least $7.7 million for at least 39 speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs and UBS.”

Clinton has repeatedly insisted that the speeches and donations had no impact on her decisions as senator or secretary of state. “You will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received,” she said during a debate with Sanders.

The excerpts released yesterday contain few real bombshells but they do suggest that Clinton had a level of comfort with her audience. In one Goldman Sachs speech, she spoke about the difficulty Wall Street officials have making the transition to government work, noting, “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives. You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous and unnecessary.”

In another speech, she allowed that the growing wealth of her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had insulated her from some of the realities of middle-class life, while acknowledging “the growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged.” She then went on to reminisce about her own “solid middle-class upbringing.”

“So I lived that,” she said. “And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

At another speech before the National Multifamily Housing Council in April 2013, Clinton said politicians sometimes needed to have both a “public and a private position” on contentious policy matters: “I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least.”

That is borne out by some of her remarks about the financial system and the 2008 crash, which suggest a view that is more nuanced than her typical campaign speeches. Clinton noted that there was a common public view that the United States and its banking system had caused the crash:

“Now, that’s an oversimplification we know, but it was the conventional wisdom. And I think that there’s a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened with greater transparency, with greater openness on all sides, you know, what happened, how did it happen, how do we prevent it from happening,” she said to Goldman Sachs in October 2013.

And to Deutsche Bank in October 2014: “So even if it may not be 100 percent true, if the perception is that somehow the game is rigged, that should be a problem for all of us, and we have to be willing to make that absolutely clear. And if there are issues, if there’s wrongdoing, people have to be held accountable and we have to try to deter future bad behavior, because the public trust is at the core of both a free market economy and a democracy.”

As a Democrat who represented New York in the Senate, Clinton has had an ambivalent relationship with Wall Street. In 2008, she voted for what would become the start of the bank bailout, noting in an interview with WNYC that it would benefit her state.

“I think the banks of New York and our other financial institutions are probably the biggest winners in this [bailout], which is one of the reasons why in the end, despite my serious questions about it, I supported it,” she told host Brian Lehrer. But she also voted for the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill, and more recently she has proposed tighter oversight of large financial institutions.

She has also lambasted “the shadow banking industry,” which includes firms such as hedge funds and insurance companies that perform many of the same functions as banks. And she has proposed closing a loophole that allows banks to trade taxpayer backed money through hedge funds.

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