CDP Institute

Less impressive is news that a data breach at T-Mobile has exposed personal data on 2.3 million customers, including names, Zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, and account numbers. You’ll recall that T-Mobile generated positive news recently by promising that customer services calls would be answered by real people. Sic transit gloria mundi, amirite?

Endless reports about online privacy and security issues seem to be having an effect on user behavior. Pew Research Center finds that more than half of U.S. teens are trying to cut back usage of social media (57%), video games (58%) and mobile phones (52%). They worry about their parents too: 51% of teens say a parent or caregiver has been distracted by their own phone when trying to converse with them. Plenty more in this vein.

In fact, those crazy kids aren’t as glued to their smartphones as everyone assumes. A global survey of college students by Ad Age Studio 30 and UNiDAYS found 94% own a laptop, 32% watch streaming video on a conventional TV, and a whopping 77% read printed books. More than half (58%) don’t trust Facebook with their personal data and 78% are selective in sharing location with apps. But they’re not cave-people: 80% get news from social media compared with just 13% from print.

More bad news for Facebook: while consumers list Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the top ten most ethical companies, Facebook doesn’t appear in the top twenty. This from brand research agency Morning Consult, in a report with much advice about businesses taking social and political positions. Mostly they suggest you don’t.

Predictive advertising company AdTheorent has announced a product that sends ads to friends and family of targeted individuals. Clients send the company a target list; AdTheorent matches it against its 740 million device database, finds other devices in the same physical household, and serves ads on those devices. So those red shoes you didn’t buy can now chase your significant other across the Internet. It’s really just household targeting but it sure sounds annoying.

Adobe has announced some minor email improvements, including an enhanced email designer, added reporting, and multilingual push messages. But it’s Adobe so you’re probably interested.

Mobile marketing platform CleverTap is less known than Adobe but has a more impressive announcement: a new journey builder with the full set of bells and whistles. We’re talking drag-and-drop interface, contextual messages, branches based on user response, live statistics, dynamic segmentation, and the rest.

Data quality vendor Melissa has launched Unison, an integrated platform that lets users set up process flows combining standardization, validation, and enrichment. The new system is an on-premises, client-server product, if you remember what those mean.

Returning to the present: small business social media vendor MeetEdgar can now automatically write and publish posts by reading content from a user-specified Web page. It will automatically vary the wording in each item. No more pesky thinking, thank goodness.

Continuing our series on Privacy News You Won’t Read: Reuters Institute found 22% fewer third party cookies on European news sites since GDPR went into effect. Mention that the next time somebody says GDPR hasn’t had an impact or drop it into any random conversation.

CDP BlueConic has integrated Decibel’s proprietary Digital Experience Score, enabling marketers to build campaign segments and identify experience issues. Decibel tracks Web visitor behaviors down to the level of mouse movements and then applies AI to infer user attitudes such as frustration. They describe the result as a “digital version of Net Promoter Score” but frankly it’s a lot cooler.

You haven’t shown much interest in privacy-related news, Dear Reader, so I don’t publish much of it. But it seems worth mentioning that that Google is being sued after an Associated Press story last week revealed that turning off “Location History” doesn’t stop some Android apps from tracking your location history. If you want more on privacy and BigTech misbehaviors, see this post on the Customer Experience Matrix blog.