The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settles with General Motors putting a 5-year moratorium on the company to keep it from selling driver location data it collected. This follows a discovery that GM had been collecting and selling the data of millions of consumers without their intended consent. This was because the sign-up process for GM’s OnStar service was confusing to users who were unclear what they were agreeing to.
While only 2% of consumers worry about their data being used for personalized advertising, 80% are concerned about it being used for criminal activity, according to an IAB survey of some 4,000 shoppers. Only 40% of U.S. consumers know they access and delete their data, while 60% find privacy management inconvenient and complex. A strong majority like relevant and personalized ads.
A suit seeking $1,000/user payout has been filed in the US against LinkedIn Premium claiming the platform shared private messages of users with other companies after automatically opting them in to a program that provided data for training AI. The filing also claimed the company knew it was in violation of what users agreed to and that this was part of a patterns of concealing its actions.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.