December, 2022 - CDP Institute - Page 2

Dates : December 2022

A lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta has been filed in Kenya’s High Court over its alleged role in fueling violence and hate in eastern and southern Africa.

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In a major boost to Asia’s third largest economy’s towering ambitions to dominate the smart devices market, India’s home-grown brands now comprise 55 per cent of the country’s accessories’ space, data by market intelligence-major IDC India showed. The accessories’ space includes hearables, wearables, and power accessories. The IDC India attributed the dominance of Indian wearable brands to new launches, discounts across channels, and aggressive marketing by brands.

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Google announced a slew of new features at its ‘Google for India 2022,’ plus increased use of artificial intelligence across different platforms. These include a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru to enable Indian internet users to read webpages in their native language and a plan to build a unified model capable of handling more than 100 native languages of India.

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An Australian-developed technology to convert ammonia into green hydrogen is being trialed in the United Kingdom, with hopes the Fortescue Future Industries-backed method will help turbocharge the uptake of hydrogen as a clean energy source, especially for fuel cells. The new “cracker” technology will convert ammonia into green hydrogen for electricity generation and could have future uses for vehicles such as fuel-cell electric buses and replacement diesel generators. The technology has big implications for developing green hydrogen at an industrial scale, given the fuel can be transported via ammonia.

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Credit Clear (CCR), which provides tech solutions to the debt collections industry has just mapped out a three-year plan to triple its market share in Australia. The company anticipates revenue to grow to $100 million per annum over this period, underpinning an “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization” (EBITDA) growth to $25-30 million per annum. CCR currently has a 1.4% market penetration in the Australian debt collection industry worth $2.5 billion.

CDPI Emerging Markets

‘Tis the season for advice from companies you don’t trust. Having created immense uncertainty with its ever-changing schedule for third-party cookie deprecation and rotating cast of privacy-safe(ish) targeting alternatives, Google has set out its latest version of the path forward. It mostly comes down to letting Google target for you and grade its own results.

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Meta also has a big “trust me” sticker attached to its latest offering, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Similar to Google’s Performance Max, the service asks marketers to share customer lists, ad materials, campaign targets, and a budget, and then let Meta decide what ads to buy and offers to show. Like Google, Meta will tell advertisers how well it did rather than giving them data to judge for themselves.

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TikTok is offering more modest help, in the form of a report on marketing trends for 2023. It’s exceptionally well organized, but the trust barrier is high: the federal government is poised to ban TikTok on government computers and a recent study found TikTok pushes self-harm and suicide videos to vulnerable youths within minutes of registration.

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One of this year’s most important meta-stories has been regulators’ increasingly effective pushback against seemingly unstoppable tech giants. We’ve had three examples in the past week, starting with Amazon’s agreement to reduce the advantages it gives to its own products and stop helping itself with data it collects about sales by independent merchants. Both changes are in response to European Union anti-trust activity and presumably apply only within Europe.

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EU regulators have just warned Meta about using ad-related data from competitors to benefit their Facebook Marketplace classified advertising service. Like Amazon, Meta has been leveraging its control over what users see to favor its own products. That’s probably illegal in the U.S. too, but so far the tech industry has been largely successful in restraining U.S. regulators and Congress from taking action. (For a rare exception, see today’s Privacy Newsletter item about the Federal Trade Commission’s $520 million settlement with Epic Games.)

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Most potentially impactful of all, Apple is reportedly planning to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone. Sellers could presumably bypass Apple’s 30% commission on payments, a sore point for many and huge profit source for Apple. Apple has faced some pressure about this in the U.S., where iPhone market share is much higher than elsewhere. But new EU regulations are what’s forcing the change.

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Google received a mixed ruling on a suit alleging the company collected data about people who browsed in “incognito mode.” The federal judge ruled users cannot gain monetary damages on a class-wide basis but did allow the users to proceed with the case to request restricting data collection by Google. In Meta’s case, a federal judge rejected a $37.5 million settlement negotiated by the company and class action lawyers representing an estimated 70 million users. The lawsuit found Meta collected users' IP addresses, revealing general information about location - in violation of a prior privacy policy.

CDPI Privacy Newsletter