CDP Institute

We see plenty of privacy stories but the editor of our Privacy Newsletter has dibs on all the good stuff. I did snag this report about ProtonMail and other privacy-first app vendors warning that the European Union Council seems disposed towards requiring “backdoor” access to encrypted messages.  The goal is to help law enforcement but there’s no real way to keep backdoors safe from unauthorized use.

Happy International Privacy Day, Dear Reader. You’ll find all sorts of events online. If you want to take concrete action, this page from the National Cybersecurity Alliance connects you with links to reset your personal privacy settings on more than one hundred sites including all your data-gobbling favorites. Hours of fun!

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.

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.

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.

Earlier this month, NGDATA announced a program that lets other software companies embed its CDP into their products.  “NGDATA Inside” goes beyond standard API connectors to build direct integrations with partner products.  It saves partners the effort of building or buying a CDP of their own.

Raise your hand if you think the problem with today’s news industry is that Facebook doesn’t have enough control over the news people see.  But you’re not in charge, Dear Reader, so they’re launching a UK version of the Facebook News program that’s been live in the U.S. since June. Story selection is based on a mix of curation and personal behaviors.  Facebook shares a few crumbs of revenue with news providers.

While we’re on the subject, Twitter is also trying to improve its news content.  They just launched cutely-named Birdwatch, which will let vetted users flag and notate misleading Tweets.  Let’s be blunt: the list of things that could go wrong is far longer than the list of things that could go right.

Big Tech is increasingly on the defensive these days.  One front is Australia’s demand that Google pay news organizations for links to their content.  Google threatened last week to remove its search engine from Australia rather than comply.  Remember when Google said there’s no need for anti-trust regulation because it faces so much competition?

Google probably doesn’t consider B2B identity resolution vendor Versium as a competitor.  But Versium is positioning its latest offering as a way to escape from Google and other “walled gardens”.  The extension lets its REACH platform connect business professionals to their consumer identities, giving B2B marketers more ways to reach them and letting consumer marketers target them too.

Speaking of B2B marketing, this LinkedIn study finds that B2B tech buyers are like consumers: they rank price and features as most important when selecting a new vendor.  Less expected: 63% of tech purchases are influenced by functions outside of IT.  Call them  “citizen tech buyers” if that makes you happy.

Acquia, which owns the former AgilOne CDP, has launched a partner community to simplify integration of other systems with Acquia’s digital experience platform. Illustrating what’s possible, they also announced Acquia Digital Commerce, which combines Acquia components with commercetools’ ecommerce platform and Lucidworks’ product discovery solution.