Heads up! California’s Attorney General just issued warning of an investigative sweep targeting mobile apps, particularly in retail, travel and food service industries that fail to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Letters were sent to businesses that may fail to provide consumers opt-out mechanisms or fail to honor consumer opt-out and deletion requests.
In the latest Whack-a-Mole privacy exposure reveal at Twitter, a former-employee whistleblower has told the US Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and members of Congress that as many as 4,000 Twitter engineers could have accessed user data, including after Musk’s takeover via a function nicknamed “GodMode.” Twitter, again having recently gutted its compliance and communications teams, had no comment.
The Optimove 2023 Consumer Trust of Retailers Survey of US consumers found more than half don’t trust brand handling of personal information, and 77% unsubscribe from brands when they feel information is misused. Interestingly, 64% of the 406 surveyed said they are loyal to and shop at brands they don’t trust – and indicated the most important action a brand can take to change that is, according to 56%, to have a policy that it won’t share personal information.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.