Texas becomes the tenth US state to pass a privacy bill, but it will go into effect before some others. In fact, Texas has passed three bills – the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (HB 4) to regulate collection of personal data by business entities; the children’s social media bill (HB 18) to protect children from harmful trade practices; and the data broker bill (SB 2105).
JD Supra announced this along with an excellent overview of US state legislation to date.
Unfortunately, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which has just settled a suit with Amazon for $5.8 million, Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera was found to be spying on female customers in their bedrooms and bathrooms. This comes just after the company agreed to pay a $25 million settlement from the FTC's children’s privacy suit.
TransUnion’s 2023 State of Omnichannel Fraud Report shows fraud attempts up globally, and increasingly sophisticated, between 2019-2022. Consistent with other surveys on consumer concerns about how businesses handle their privacy, TransUnion’s findings were that 63% of digital consumers wouldn’t return to a website if they had fraud concerns and that 48% abandoned their online shopping carts for the same reason.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.