CDP Institute

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.

Flaws in Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals could allow users’ anonymity to be compromised and permit tracking, says the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal. Among its responsibilities, the ICO is charged with protecting data privacy. The concerns have been shared with the Competition and Markets Authority which is already scrutinizing Google’s proposals from an antitrust perspective.

International supermarket chain Aldi says it is the first retailer to deploy cashier-free checkout in an existing, full-size store in the U.S. It is implementing Grabango (get it?) checkout-free technology in Aurora, Ill. This comes after Amazon dropped its Just Walk Out technology from large grocery stores, although it will continue to use it in smaller locations.

Salesforce has reversed course on its bid to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica a source has told Reuters. Informatica itself said that it is not in talks to be acquired. Salesforce stocks rose on this latest news while Informatica’s fell.

Behavioral data analytics platform Fullstory has introduced a new solution, Data Direct, to capture behavioral signals across web and mobile and channel them into destinations within the business’s data eco-system. The flow of structured behavioral data can, for example, be integrated into data warehouses, APIs and webhooks. Data Direct will be available within Fullstory or as a standalone solution.

The Japan FTC has found that Google placed unfair restrictions on Yahoo Japan when it altered a 2020 deal to allow Yahoo to use Google’s search engine advertising technology that linked ads to search keywords. Google has submitted a plan to resolve the dispute that the FTC has called “workable.” The FTC has said that Google’s unfair practices started ten years ago and continued for some seven years.

“Ask Meta AI anything” is what you now see instead of the traditional search bar across Meta apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI will still perform the basic search function but will also answer questions and chat with you. It should hardly be a surprise when a tech company launches a genAI solution these days but this is a bold challenge to Google and Open.ai (it’s also available as a standalone tool at Meta.ai).

Adobe AI Assistant is not only a copilot that can respond to natural language questions and requests across the Adobe suite; it’s also a tool to review and summarize documents like PDFs and Power Point presentations. Adobe Express provides mobile app access to Adobe’s genAI tools like Firefly. Both products had been in beta for some weeks.

SAS has stepped up its “trustworthy AI” products and services by offering “model cards,” described as “nutrition labels” for select large language models. They will serve stakeholders across the business by automatically evaluating LLMs for accuracy, fairness and performance decay. SAS also launched an AI Governance Advisory group to advise customers on governance in the context of their own businesses.

GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads.  The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles.  GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.

Maybe you want to buy stuff while watching TV, and maybe you don’t.  Shopsense hopes you and lots of other folks do, since they’ve just released Shopsense AI, which makes content shoppable with broadcast and streaming networks’ own apps and ecommerce sites. Catalog-style ads will appear on users’ mobile devices, not the TV shows themselves.

Ecommerce giant Amazon  –  perhaps you’ve heard of them? – also wants you shop on an app that’s synchronized with your TV viewing.  Their approach is the new Amazon Live channel, which provides an app linked to shopping programs on Prime Video or Amazon FreeVee.  Research from LG Ad Solutions shows that 45% of connected TV viewers already shop online while watching.