CDP Institute

They didn’t call it a CDP, but Meta just launched a product to “connect your first-party data from any sources to any destination, streamlining your data handling processes and unlocking valuable insights to optimize your marketing campaigns.” The name of this miracle cure is Signals Gateway, and pricing seems to start at $30 per month. Data is hosted in Amazon Web Services and, at least in theory, Meta can’t see it.

OpenAI has removed the sign-in requirement from ChatGPT searches, taking another step towards competing with Google for search advertising revenues. A Semrush analysis last November found that almost half of ChatGPT queries are already being answered using search, sending traffic to more than 30,000 unique domains. OpenAI still has some catching up to do: at the end of last year, ChatGPT had 566 million users compared with Google’s 6.5 billion.

DeepSeek’s cost-effective, open source gen AI has caused a lot of excitement, but the other shoe did not take long to drop. Cybersecurity experts say DeepSeek contains code that allows it to send user data direct to the Chinese government. You’d think that might provoke calls for it to be banned in the U.S.

Meta’s WhatsApp detected a hack targeting 90 users in two dozen countries. Meta said that Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions is responsible and has sent a cease-and-desist letter. The targets apparently included journalists and “members of civil society.”

OpenAI has a new AI agent called Deep Research to support, well, deep research. OpenAI says it can conduct multi-step research tasks, synthesizing hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst. It will support research into complex purchases, possibly including martech software.  There’s no truth to the rumor that it answers every question with, “It depends.”

Meltwater’s 640-page compendium of global digital information highlights a “low stakes social” trend: audiences are asking social media to provide some light relief from the emotional turmoil of real life. On average, users are on social more than two hours each day (out of more than six hours on the internet in general). Marketers’ biggest challenge in handling social media is team bandwidth.

AI vendor Anthropic has developed a new technique to protect against universal jailbreaks, jailbreaks that can break all of a model’s defenses. The technique focuses on Constitutional Classifiers, trained on synthetically generated data, that filter the overwhelming majority of jailbreaks. Anthropic claims minimal over-refusals and no large increase in compute overhead.

Content discovery platform Outbrain has completed an almost $1 billion merger with programmatic ad platform Teads. The combined solutions will operate under the Teads name. This comes several years after the high-profile merger between Outbrain and Taboola fell apart.

The tech industry group Netchoice has sued to block legislation that would require businesses to assess whether new features would harm minors and restrict their ability to collect data from minors. The legislation was enacted in Maryland last May. It is similar to the Californian Appropriate-Design Code, also held up by the courts.

Faced with competition from China’s open source AI model DeepSeek, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has admitted that his company was on the “wrong side of history” for not going open source itself. Meanwhile, DeepSeek has been found vulnerable to “jailbreaking” and prone to hallucinations, while bad actors in Iran and elsewhere have become heavy users of Google Gemini. Any need for government oversight here?

Hackers new to cybersecurity have found themselves targeted by a trojanized version of XWorm RAT builder. The malware has been spread through GitHub, Telegram and file-sharing programs and has compromised over 18,000 devices. Targets are mainly found in the U.S., Russia, India, Ukraine, and Turkey.

In an experiment from Google’s search labs, AI agents are offered who can “wait on hold for you.” The Ask for Me tool will call local businesses on your behalf to set up appointments or collect information on product availability and pricing. Ask for Me can be enabled on Search Labs now and will maybe put a lot of concierges out of work.