CDP Institute

Finally, PayPal has purchased e-commerce recommendation engine Jetlore for an undisclosed sum. Jetlore analyzes product descriptions, individual behavior histories, and context to make very precise recommendations. It joins PayPal’s Marketing Solutions group, which has tools to help merchants analyze their customers and offer customized purchase incentives. Didn’t know they did that, did you? Jetlore had raised $10.6 million.

Let’s follow up today on stories we’ve covered earlier. Remember that mini-trend of data quality scoring services? LiveRamp has announced its own scoring initiative, focused more on quality than lawful consent. Its first partner will be Lucid, which will check data sources against Lucid’s panel of survey respondents. Irony alert: quality measures are becoming available just as the entire notion of buying lists is under attack for privacy reasons.

Ramifications of GDPR continue to play out. Several U.S. publishers have blocked access to their sites from within the EU. Washington Post has given visitors a forced choice between free access with data sharing and paid access without. It’s not clear this is permitted under GDPR but we’ll soon find out. We also have a separate story that German publisher Axel Springer has released a free, open source consent management tool, providing a publisher-friendly alternative to the one from Google.

One GDPR-induced crisis is resolved: Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern, is back at work despite his scandalous behavior at our GDPR Day party last week. He offers this study from Performics, Microsoft, and Northwestern University, proving that search queries with terms like “shop” indicate that someone is interested in buying things. You read it here first.

Programmatic ad buying in Europe has been disrupted by incomplete preparations for GDPR, which went into effect on Friday.

The dust hasn’t settled on GDPR but attention is already turning to the next set of European Union privacy rules, known as ePrivacy. This protects communications and in particular will restrict ability for companies to capture metadata such as location. It also imposes stricter rules on data security. Implementation is being delayed as details are worked out amid lobbying by tech firms, privacy advocates, and others.

Here’s a little reminder of what could go wrong: a Portland woman found her Alexa device had sent a recording of her private conversation to an email contact without permission. (Portlandia fans will be especially amused.) Amazon found the device was functioning properly but misunderstood background noises as instructions. Related: researchers have found they can embed undetectable smart device voice commands within recorded songs. Remind me again why we need these devices?

“Self-Learning Data Platform” Reltio has raised $45 million in new funding, bringing their total to $117 million. Reltio’s roots are in master data management but it now focuses primarily on unified customer databases and related tools for analytics and recommendations. The “self-learning” label relates to use of machine learning to generate insights and recommendations.

Most of the GDPR discussion has focused on bringing your own data collection into compliance.

Of course you know that GDPR goes into effect today. You probably weren’t wondering about CDP Institute’s own compliance efforts but rest assured we’ve done our best. You’ll notice new consent language on our downloads and we’ve updated our terms of use and privacy policy. What’s that you say – we’re supposed to notify subscribers of those changes? We just did.

Let’s take a break from obsessing about GDPR and obsess about blockchain. TechCrunch says venture capitalists have invested more than $1.3 billion so far this year, more than the previous eighteen months combined. Not really surprising.

There are so many new blockchain products that we can only mention the most intriguing. Poseidon Foundation uses blockchain to buy carbon credits as part of retail transactions. Their pilot project contributes to forest conservation in Peru every time someone buys Ben & Jerry’s ice cream at a store in London. The low transaction costs of blockchain make it practical.