President Biden is expected to issue an order to prevent data brokers from selling sensitive data on Americans to ‘hostile foreign countries,’ including China, Russia and Iran. The move comes as the US still has not passed federal privacy legislation and concern has grown that advances in AI will make sensitive data, including geolocation, biometric and genomic data easier to analyze and to use for spying or blackmail.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused anti-virus software company, Avast of harvesting and selling the data of millions of customers. The company which promised to protect customer data, instead sold it – and now will pay a $16.5 million fine. The data was sold via company subsidiary, Jumpshot, to more than 100 third parties. Exposure included financial and location data as well as health and religious search information.
A Colorado Privacy Act amendment to add biometric protections advances to the State Senate. The amendment expands the definition of ‘sensitive data’ to include data about individual biological, genetic and neural properties. This reflects growing concern about new technologies, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip implant and evolving technologies from Meta, Apple and others for reading brainwaves.
Media mix models (MMM), originally developed in the 1960’s, have undergone a resurgence as new technologies make them easier to execute and click-based attribution becomes less credible. But evaluating MMM brings its own challenges. Australia-based Mutinex offers a vendor-neutral Open Source MMM Validation Framework which is now available for free to North American marketers and agencies.