The other side of customer tracking by advertisers is identity management by customers. Blockchain platform Dragonchain has just spun off a new company called MyFii to develop its decentralized identity solution, which splits customer information into pieces that can be stored separately. Companies can then verify identities based on the fragments, thus avoiding the risk of storing personal identifiers. Clever.
So, the #StopHateForProfit Facebook ad boycott happened with no meaningful impact on the company’s revenue but what our friends at The New York Times call “reputational harm”. Arguably more significant, Adobe announced it will join Twitter in banning all political ads in its Advertising Cloud. Not that were many to start with, but it’s another talking point for people who argue that ineffectively governed political advertising is worse than none at all.
Whatever you call the opposite of a trend, the term applies to the struggling world of in-store retail. That has to make things tough for computer vision specialist Advertima, which tracks shoppers as they move through physical space. Of course, they prefer to see opportunities, such as grab-and-go shopping without paying at a register. Somebody agrees, since they just raised $17 million, raising their total funding to $26 million.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.