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.
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.)
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.
Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt. Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection. According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”