It’s been a good week for Google, if not necessarily the rest of us. Fresh from a U.S. court ruling effectively preserving its search money, the company learned that European Union regulators have paused an expected fine for adtech abuses. No reason was given although fear of U.S. retaliation is suspected.
Audience measurement vendor Comscore has launched a new venture to build privacy-safe audiences from privacy-unsafe customer data. The trick is to match IDs from third-party audiences to Comscore’s own consumer panel, and then build a look-alike model using non-personal attributes. The dozen or so partners providing the input audiences include Circana, Dynata, Eyeota, Polk Automotive Solutions, Symphony Health, and TransUnion.
Speaking of monopolists, Amazon wants to capture every purchase possible, even from customers standing in a retail store. To help things along, they’ve enhanced their Lens visual shopping tool with Lens Live, which lets users research a product by pointing at it with their camera. This removes the step of uploading an image. As TechCrunch points out, Google and Pinterest already have similar features.
ChatGPT is hoping to grab another slice of your attention with Pulse, a now-in-limited-preview feature that will proactively deliver daily updates on information it thinks you’ll find useful. The new service is positioned as a personal assistant that will select contents “based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar.” Forget about privacy; the real question is whether this becomes a news source that gives ChatGPT the ability to shape your opinions.