On a more positive privacy note, Apple offered an easy-to-understand story that illustrated how its privacy controls can make a big difference. Following the simple story of a dad taking his daughter to the park, Apple shows step-by-step how much data could be revealed by looking up the weather, checking a map, taking a photo, and other common actions — and how much of that sharing its privacy controls would prevent.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a global regulatory framework to rein-in the power of social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. Speaking at a news conference, Guterres expressed grave concern about the amount of data the companies control, the potential use of that data to influence politics and our behavior, and the risks of allowing these companies to continue to have unrestricted power over our lives.
As more people are vaccinated and we move toward a return to public events, travel and gatherings, there is a clear need to have a valid, secure way to confirm whether a given person has been vaccinated. The Commons Project and a group of health and technology companies including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic and Cigna are looking to develop common standards for health cards, via a new file type that could hold vaccine records without violating privacy.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.