Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has begun an inquiry into whether the data of EU citizens has been unlawfully processed by Elon Musk’s X. Concern is that personal data being used to train X’s AI assistant, Grok large language models (LLM).
Speaking of monopolists, Google is unabashedly using AI Overviews to redirect users to Google search results. AI Overviews is increasing the number of links that it shares in its answers presented in summary format, but the links often go to Google search pages rather than other websites. Google says the links will appear when its systems determine they are “useful,” although they didn’t specify whether that’s useful to consumers or to Google.
Intrusiveness got you worried? DOGE is raising the bar for privacy advocates and US citizens on reasons they should be concerned as it pursues mandates to root out data across departments and to link their databases for more comprehensive profiles on individuals. The recent New York Times article scarily lists more than 300 fields of data this can easily include and points out people who provided their information believed it would not be shared or combined outside the individual agency.
Media mix models (MMM), originally developed in the 1960’s, have undergone a resurgence as new technologies make them easier to execute and click-based attribution becomes less credible. But evaluating MMM brings its own challenges. Australia-based Mutinex offers a vendor-neutral Open Source MMM Validation Framework which is now available for free to North American marketers and agencies.