Call it karmic balance: companies struggling to identify anonymous customers must also strain to verify that people who do identify themselves are really who they claim. The reason, of course, is there are more fraud possibilities as online business expands. One example of the growing identity authentication industry: Mastercard just bought anti-fraud identity specialist Ekata for a cool $850 million.
Privacy browser Brave has removed FLoC from its version for desktop and Android, and search engine DuckDuckGo has changed its browser extension to block Google’s FLoC tracking in Chrome. FLoC, which is Google’s “Federated Learning of Cohorts,” claims to be privacy-friendly, but “shares information about browsing behavior with sites and advertisers,” according to Brave executives.
On the same lines, digital commerce protection platform Signifyd just raised a $205 million Series E. Signifyd doubled its revenue last year and expects to reach a $200 million run rate by 2022. The company has an identity graph that can be used to improve customer experience as well as reduce fraud.
Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt. Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection. According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”