SheerID calls itself an “identity marketing” vendor, meaning it verifies that people who sign up for offers limited to groups such as students, military, or healthcare workers are really members of those groups. They do this by collecting a ton of data while somehow keeping within privacy rules. In fact, they’re so good at the privacy bit that they’re expanding into 13 European countries, GDPR notwithstanding.
Recommendation engine Bloomreach is buying CDP and marketing automation vendor Exponea. No price was announced. The deal follows similar combinations including Segment/Twilio, Manthan/RichRelevance, CrossEngage/Gpredictive, Agilone/Acquia, and Emarsys/SAP. Bloomreach also announced a $150 million funding.
Of course, the death of third party cookies is the mother of all privacy challenges. Google just released research showing that its favored alternative, which assigns consumers to segments based on their Website visits but doesn’t share individual IDs, gives nearly the same results as cookie-based techniques. Experts are split on whether the approach, called FLoC for reasons that are too complicated to explain, is a meaningful privacy improvement.
In a follow-up to their January report, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority raised the number of concerns they have with Privacy Sandbox to 79. Among other issues, they adopted the privacy concerns raised by another U.K. regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office. Google’s recent decision to shift third-party cookie deprecation to next year might mean they saw this coming.