Speaking of trust, European regulators don’t trust tech giants to treat their competitors fairly. Nor does anyone else, but the EU is doing something about it. Their latest step is a set of guidelines for documenting how search ranking algorithms work. The guidelines aren’t legally binding but they offer strong hints for how the EU wants the platforms to comply with the Platform-to-Business Regulation (P2B), which is.
The Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general filed parallel anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook yesterday, alleging violations of federal and state anti-trust laws. The main charge is that buying WhatsApp and Instagram were aimed at removing market competitors to preserve Facebook’s ad monopoly. The long-expected suits may seek divestiture of the two acquisitions and other constraints.
A new University of Cambridge study indicates voice assistants like Alexa, Amazon Echo and Google Home can pick up room noise including keyboard taps that malicious actors might subsequently use to discover your PINs. This is an increasing privacy threat as we add more smart speakers throughout our workplaces and homes.
GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads. The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles. GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.