The Motley Fool reported 2023-10-27 that The auto parts specialist posted mixed third quarter results. While it notched a convincing revenue beat, it fell notably short of the consensus analyst profitability estimate. LKQ Corp (NASDAQ: LKQ) has a price-to ...

LKQ Corp (LKQ) Shares Decline Despite Market Challenges

Late last week, more than half a dozen amicus briefs were filed in support of GM Global Technology Operations in a case that is set to potentially shake up design patent law.

Amici for IP and Auto Industries Tell Full CAFC to Stick with What Works on Design Patents

While General Motors (GM) beat earnings estimates, its crosstown rival Ford (F) misses the same. Both auto biggies pull out guidance for 2023 amid the uncertainty associated with the ongoing UAW strike.

Auto Roundup: Q3 Earnings in Spotlight, GM Beats, F Misses & More

LKQ Euro Car Parts has reported a 40% increase in its online sales in the last 12 months, as more customers switch to ordering parts digitally.The automotive parts supplier hit a quarter of a millio.....

LKQ Euro Car Parts - 40% increase in its online sales in the last 12 months

LKQ Corporation, a leading provider of automotive replacement parts and services, fell short of earnings expectations in the third quarter of 2023, reporting an EPS of $0.86 compared to the expected $0.95. The company’s CEO, Nick Zarcone, acknowledged ...

LKQ Corporation Reports Disappointing Q3 2023 Earnings Amidst Challenging Market Conditions

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Why LKQ Stock Sputtered This Week

In the aftermarket for 20+ years, Musselman has been responsible for LKQ's global regulatory and policy initiatives since 2019.

LKQ’s Ian Musselman Appointed to CAWA’s Board of Directors

LKQ Corporation announced it has sold GSF Car Parts (“GSF”) to Epiris Fund III (“Epiris”), a private-equity fund based in the United Kingdom. The divestiture fulfills LKQ’s undertaking to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to sell the GSF business in connection with LKQ’s acquisition of Uni-Select Inc.

LKQ Completes Divestiture of GSF Car Parts

LKQ Corporation LKQ delivered adjusted earnings of 86 cents per share for third-quarter 2023, down from 97 cents reported in the year-ago period and missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 95 cents.The aftermarket auto parts distributor registered quarterly revenues of $3,

LKQ Q3 Earnings Miss Estimates, Sales Beat, Guidance Revised

(2) References in this release to Net income and Diluted earnings per share, and the corresponding adjusted figures, reflect amounts from continuing operations attributable to LKQ stockholders. LKQ will host an investor conference call and webcast on ...

LKQ Corporation Announces Results For Third Quarter 2023

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LKQ Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, distributes replacement parts, components, and systems used in the repair and maintenance of vehicles. It operates in three segments: North America, Europe, and Specialty. The company distributes bumper covers, automotive body panels, and lights, as well as automotive glass products, such as windshields; salvage products, including mechanical and collision parts comprising engines; transmissions; door assemblies; sheet metal products, such as trunk lids, fenders, and hoods; lights and bumper assemblies; scrap metal and other materials to metals recyclers; and brake pads, discs and sensors, clutches, steering and suspension products, filters, and oil and automotive fluids, as well as electrical products, including spark plugs and batteries. It also operates self-service retail operations under the LKQ Pick Your Part name; and designs, manufactures, and markets vehicle equipment and accessories. In addition, the company distributes recreational vehicle appliances and air conditioners, towing hitches, truck bed covers, vehicle protection products, cargo management products, wheels, tires, and suspension products. It serves collision and mechanical repair shops, and new and used car dealerships, as well as retail customers. The company operates in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Taiwan, and various other European countries. LKQ Corporation was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

Let’s just say it leaves a lot to be desired By Aaron Sankin Last year, while reporting a about how the digital advertising industry burrowed its tracking technology into scores of websites serving vulnerable and marginalized communities, I did something counterintuitive, especially for a reporter who writes about tech for a living: I surrendered to the surveillance economy. story This decision to inject pure, uncut internet directly into my veins came as I was using and helping to create The Markup’s tool, which opened my eyes even further to the plethora of companies that sought to grab my data from the websites I used on a daily basis. Until then, I had mostly used Google’s Chrome browser with the Privacy Badger extension, which blocks many forms of tracking, or Mozilla’s Firefox, which has strict privacy controls set by default. Blacklight Doing the opposite—ensuring that as many ad tech companies as possible got my data and then making sure that I saw all the personalized ads targeted at me as a result—seemed like a way to get a visceral feel for the modern internet that most people are subjected to. So I started using mostly Chrome, the least privacy-protective of all the major web browsers, and turned off third-party browser extensions that blocked tracking requests and digital ads (which also frequently insert their own user tracking on browsers). I cannot in good conscience recommend this tactic to any normal person, not only because it’s good to be thoughtful rather than chaotic in your digital hygiene but also because having tons of ads load on every site you visit makes mindlessly clicking around the internet even slower and more of a chore than it was in my previous, privacy-protected life. Now, six or so months later, seemed like a perfect time to run another experiment: Could I get the ad tech companies to stop using all this beautiful data they’ve been collecting on me? Enter: AdChoices. Most of the time when you see a banner ad on the internet, there’s a little triangle in the corner that you’ve probably never actively thought about until this very moment. AdChoices is a program by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), a consortium of digital advertising groups. Among other things, it provides what it calls a one-stop portal where people can ask more than 100 ad tech companies to opt them out of being targeted with personalized ads based on their personal data. You may never have known this option exists, even though it’s been around for a decade. DAA executive director Lou Mastria said in an email that the company collaborates with BBB National Programs and the Association of National Advertisers to ensure that the ad tech companies that agree to the opt-outs actually follow through. “Their work has resulted in more than 120 enforcement cases to date, including referrals to the appropriate regulatory agencies, as needed,” he explained. “Their work has resulted in more than 120 enforcement cases to date, including referrals to the appropriate regulatory agencies, as needed,” -Lou Mastria, DAA Executive Director AdChoices’ offer was tempting. Just a few clicks on a single website and, like magic, I would stop all the ads I encountered from knowing everything about me? If only it had turned out to be so easy. Opting Out When I opened up a Firefox browser and went to the opt-out , I was greeted by a buzz of activity. The site started by automatically running some tests on my browser to check compatibility and then presented a list of participating ad tech companies. I hit the button to opt out of all of them, and we were off to the races. At the end, I got a report: 38 companies had processed my opt-out. The other 91? It said there may be a “temporary technical issue” with those. YourAdChoices.com page What? Most people would have closed the tab and given up. Honestly, I considered it. Instead, I did some research and learned that DAA’s opt-out works basically the same way that online advertisements do. It installs a cookie (a small text file that connects your device with a profile of your activity) on your web browser. In other words, DAA doesn’t provide ad tech companies with a central database of everyone who has opted out of targeting but rather requires me to add new trackers to my browser for each company that participates in order to opt out of being targeted for ads based on previous tracking. AdChoices says it uses these cookies to tell all of the participating companies not to use any of the data they’ve collected about me to choose the ads to serve me. The companies , though Mastria said that “most participating companies” stop collecting “interest-based” advertising data because it’s easier than segregating it from other data they may continue collecting, such as how many times I’ve been served an ad. can still collect data about me Firefox blocks third-party cookies by default. So, in order to tell advertisers not to use my data to personalize ads on Firefox, I would have to switch off that protection in the browser and allow these ad tech companies—and the dozens of ad tech companies that don’t appear to participate in the opt-out—to continue to gather data on my browsing habits. With the Brave browser, which is among the most privacy protecting, the opt-out process didn’t work at all with the default privacy settings. Since I don’t actually use Brave regularly, I didn’t bother trying to make it work. Chrome, which does not block cookies by default, was the most successful on the first try—but still said there was a problem opting out of 21 of the 129 participating companies. I would not be defeated. I re-ran the request a half-dozen times on Chrome, each time getting closer and closer to full opt-out. But I never reached it. I was only able to get up to 125. I was never able to opt-out of ads for four companies in Chrome: Adstra, LKQD Technologies, Marchex, and Pulpo. Mastria, of the DAA, said in an email that the reason for the failures is due to problems synchronizing its system with those of 129 participating ad tech companies. “Potential failures are regularly monitored and reported so that companies can address configuration issues,” Mastria said. Mark Peterson, a PR person working with Marchex, told me that was exactly what was happening at Marchex. It was a system integration problem the company was previously unaware of. A few days later, he let me know it was fixed. I emailed LKQD Technologies’ privacy inbox and got an unsigned email back saying the company would look into it but that I should know it primarily serves ads on mobile, not desktop, where I was trying to opt out. If I wanted to limit personalized ads on my phone, it said, I should turn on the setting on my smartphone that limits ad tracking. A couple of days later, David Hoffmann, the company’s head of ad tech, got back to me saying the opt-out seemed to be working fine for them and sent a screen recording video of a user completing the process successfully. On my end, it still wasn’t working. By the way, after I turned off cookie blocking on Firefox and re-ran the opt-out there another half-dozen times, I got it down to three failures on that browser. Two were the same companies that had persisted on Chrome, Adstra and Pulpo. The third was KBMG.com. When I approached KBMG, an unsigned email directed me to a form where I would have to upload a scan of my driver’s license in order to get the company to delete the information it had collected about me. Did I end up sending a company I had never previously heard of my driver’s license information? Yes, because apparently that’s how privacy works now. Did I end up sending a company I had never previously heard of my driver’s license information? Yes, because apparently that’s how privacy works now. Astra and Pulpo didn’t respond to my emails. Was it just me? I recruited a half-dozen of my coworkers to try the mass opt-out for themselves, and none were able to successfully opt out of every company on the first try. Is the System Broken? I did a little more research and found the problems I’d had opting out weren’t new. The DAA’s opt-out portal has been criticized practically since it launched in 2010. A 2011 Carnegie Mellon University tracked dozens of users as they attempted to navigate the process, identifying a host of issues: “Initial configuration took a long time. Difficult to navigate to actual opt-out page. Not obvious that opting out of all trackers requires switching out of default tab on opt-out page. Participants incorrectly believed that they were opting out of tracking. Participants did not realize that deleting cookies nullifies opt-outs. Opt-outs sometimes fail. Participants unable to confirm opting out was effective.” study Mastria said that DAA has since overhauled its site, “keeping pace with consumer expectations and demands”—despite my similarly frustrating experience. Jason Kint, CEO of the online publishers’ industry group Digital Content Next, gives the site poor marks. “I would argue that it had the right principles behind it, but the actual design of it and the execution for the user was a failure,” he said. He takes particular issue with the fact that it requires a cookie to work. “You would never design a system that way if your goal was to allow the user to opt out as easily as possible.” After spending a few days trying to opt out of personalized ads, where did all this leave me? There are now 124 ad tech companies that have promised not to use all the data they’ve collected about me to show me ads for the perfect pair of pants or anything else when I’m surfing the web on Firefox or Chrome. The cost is pretty high: Not only can these ad tech companies still collect data about me, but when I use Firefox, they can gather even more than they could before because I dramatically lowered my privacy settings in order to let the opt-out system function. The companies not participating in the opt-out can simply go hog wild. They can track me, load reams of personalized ads wherever I go. The works. Also, if I ever decide to clear all of my cookies, I’m effectively opted back in to personalized advertising because I will have deleted the cookies on my browser that tell the participating companies that I’ve opted out. “I do not see much value in current opt-out systems for behavioural advertising,” said Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, a professor at Radboud University’s Interdisciplinary Hub for Security, Privacy and Data Governance in The Netherlands. “In my opinion, such systems should offer an opt-in system. In other words, companies should only track people for behavioural targeting after people gave proper, informed, opt-in, consent.” This is what the new version of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system is doing, to the horror of some in the ad tech industry. The DAA’s opt-out wasn’t really meant to help consumers so much as it was meant to stave off government intervention and a then-growing movement to stop online tracking, some privacy advocates told me. “The intent of these things is to undermine legitimate privacy tools and to crowd out other new standards that would be easy for people to use and would be actually effective because they already have this thing and everyone is already on board,” said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The opt-out may look like robust privacy protection with widespread industry buy-in, but looks, in this case, are deceiving, he said. “If you need Exhibit A for why you shouldn’t let the ad industry regulate itself,” Cyphers added, “this is it.” Correction This story incorrectly identified one of the organizations DAA collaborates with to ensure the opt-outs are honored. The organization is BBB National Programs, not the Better Business Bureau. Originally published as " “ with the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license I Tried to Use the Ad Tech Industry’s Tool to Opt Out of Personalized Ads. Did It Work?

What Happens When you Try to Opt Out of Personalized Ads

Many problems, especially in scientific computing, end up being formulated as matrix operations. This can be anything from PDE-solvers (PDE - Partial Differential Equation) up to image-processing or ML-algorithms. The list is endless. Usually one has written on paper some final equations which describe your model or whatever it is, and it involves some matrix algebra like this: A = B + C Okay, looks quite easy on paper. Now, when it comes to implementation of this in JavaScript, whatever technique you are going to use (for-loops, iterators, ...), your code won't resemble above easy to read line. There is a huge amount of good matrix-libraries available, and usually they let you write something like this: A = B.add(C) This still looks not quite different from our paper version, but imagine our paper version would be this: A = (B * (C + D)) * (E + F) To put this into one line by using the '.add' notation might hurt a little and one would tend to split the code into multiple lines. Though, due to all these parenthesis, readability would be destroyed: H1 = E.add(F); H2 = C.add(D); H3 = B.multiply(H2); A = H3.multiply(H1); const const const const If we were in context of a language like C++, we can give sense to expressions involving mathematical operators between any custom types - a concept called Operator Overloading. At the time of writing, JavaScript is lacking this nice feature though. We can find some resort if we take a look at 'Tagged Templates' (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Template_literals). In essence they give us a way to interpret a given string together with value filled placeholders: A: Matrix = ...; B: Matrix = ...; C: Matrix = calc ; const const const ` + ` ${A} ${B} Here 'Matrix'  shall be some type representing a matrix. The 'calc' is a tagged template function, written by us, and it will be called with all string parts and values for given placeholders. In other words we somewhere define a function like this: { } ( ) function calc stringParts: TemplateStringsArray, ...values: any[] '1.) parse the expression
         2.) calculate it by using given   
             placeholder-values
	 3.) return the result' Our main task remains to implement the 'calc' function such that it can cope with any kind of expression from matrix-algebra. You can do it on your own, it is quite a learning-full experience, or you can use my package provided here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@applied.math.coding/lina With this at hand you can write expressions like these: calc ;

A = calc ;

calc ; ` = 3 * - ` ${A} ${B} ${C} `3 * - ` ${B} ${C} `pow( , 5)` ${A} The library also supports some form of slicing which becomes very handy in some occasions: calc ; ` )` ${A.slice( , , , ) =   
  cos(${B.slice( , , , )} 1 1 5 5 1 1 5 5 It also has some support of creating a matrix-type from given array: A = mat([[ , ],
               [ , ]]); const 1 2 3 4 Or just create a new instance of some dimensions and with all values set to 0: A = zeros( , ); const 10 10 calc ; ` =sqrt(abs( )) + 7` ${A} ${A} Note: when you add or multiply a number with a matrix-type, as in above example, the parser is handling this by element-wise applying the operation to the matrix. And finally our initial example would look like this: calc ; ` = ( * ( + )) * ( + )` ${A} ${B} ${C} ${D} ${E} ${F} For more you can look into its docs or tests. Please keep the following in mind: The library is not intended for use in computation intensive environments. It rather should be used for educational purposes or for presentation of some computations on a web-page. I used it successfully in some small project which intended to explain the solution procedure of a PDE. I hope this helps or contributes to getting new ideas!

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