It’s open season on TikTok. Their latest tormentor is the Federal Trade Commission, which has referred a complaint against TikTok and its owner ByteDance to the Department of Justice for violating, or being about to violate, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The FTC doesn’t usually announce such referrals but they made an exception because, well, it’s TikTok.
Streaming video companies don’t have the purchase data of an Amazon, so they often collaborate with retail data compilers to help advertisers target and measure results. Disney has hopped on that bandwagon by integrating data from Affinity Solutions, which brings a proprietary audience graph and transactions on some 140 million debit and credit cards.
The U.S. Department of Justice has commenced a lawsuit against Adobe accusing it of making it hard to cancel subscriptions to Photoshop and other software. In particular, it is alleged that it concealed an expensive cancellation fee from consumers and that its customer service reps made canceling difficult. This follows a lawsuit last year in which the FTC accused Amazon of making it hard to cancel Prime membership.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.