CDP Institute

The cost of subscribing for no ads on Facebook and Instagram has been cut by 40% in the E.U. Users that prefer the free service will also be able to request less personalized ads. Defying pressure from regulators, Meta continues to insist that offering a choice between paid subscriptions and free ad-powered access is a legitimate business model.

Google might have hoped its pivot on third-party cookies would get the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority off its back: no such luck. The CMA sees competition issues in Google’s decision to allow users to choose themselves whether to allow cookies. It wants updated Privacy Sandbox commitments from Google by next month.

AI may be intelligent but it’s not always smart. Researchers at Cornell have shown that AI agents that understand visual interfaces (like a computer screen) can easily be fooled by adversarial pop-ups into clicking buttons or filling forms. Pop-ups that would look very suspicious to humans just don’t trigger the same response from naive AI.

The Southern DIstrict of New York has dismissed a data scraping copyright case brought against OpenAI by Raw Story Media and AlterNet Media. The dismissal was based on plaintiffs’ lack of standing as they could not specify concrete harm to them resulting from OpenAI’s actions. OpenAI and Microsoft still face a copyright suit brought The New York Times on slightly different grounds.

AWS will allow organizations and their partners to generate data and insights in AWS clean rooms using their own custom machine learning models. Advertisers and publishers will be able to optimize campaigns while keeping their data and machine learning models private. AWS Clean Room’s own machine learning offers lookalike modeling that it says improves 36% on industry baselines.

Marketing platform Zenapse has brought its low/no-code prediction service to Google Cloud Marketplace. The move will allow implementation in as little as four hours. ZenImpact Optimization Studio uses AI-powered psychographic signals, plus demographic and behavioral data, to make real-time predictions of which products and offers will resonate with audiences.

Media effectiveness platform DoubleVerify has launched DV Attention for Publishers. With advertisers increasingly interested in attention as a campaign success metric, this will give publishers insight into the effectiveness of their own inventory. It will also allow publishers to benchmark their inventory against standards for specific advertisers verticals.

Unlike the Biden administration in the U.S., the Canadian government is not threatening Canadians’ access to the TikTok app (or creators’ ability to post content). What it is doing is shutting down TikTok Technology Canada, Inc., the local TikTok business. It cited national security risks related to TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance.

Several of the big “gatekeepers” of the internet have been under investigation for possible breaches of the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act, but Apple wins the prize for being fined first. The fine relates to anti-competitive activity around the Apple App Store. Bloomberg reports that the decision is still being drafted, but the fine could be up to 10% of global annual turnover (yes, tens of billions of dollars).

After initial (apparent) enthusiasm about getting into Google Privacy Sandbox and testing its various components, adtech seems to have cooled on the whole thing according to research by Sincera. The reason is obvious: Google’s pivot on third-party cookies. The Topics API, perhaps the most widely discussed component, has seen adoption relatively flat July through September, after (slightly) more enthusiasm February through April.

Although cybersecurity is beating out economic and talent risks as the top risk factor in 2024, 80% of companies have no dedicated plan to guard against risks from genAI. Only 19% have formally trained the organization on the risks, while 16% say they have a dedicated budget. Riskonnect surveyed over 200 risk, resilience and compliance professionals.

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