Happy International Privacy Day, Dear Reader. You’ll find all sorts of events online. If you want to take concrete action, this page from the National Cybersecurity Alliance connects you with links to reset your personal privacy settings on more than one hundred sites including all your data-gobbling favorites. Hours of fun!
We see plenty of privacy stories but the editor of our Privacy Newsletter has dibs on all the good stuff. I did snag this report about ProtonMail and other privacy-first app vendors warning that the European Union Council seems disposed towards requiring “backdoor” access to encrypted messages. The goal is to help law enforcement but there’s no real way to keep backdoors safe from unauthorized use.
Recommendation engine Bloomreach is buying CDP and marketing automation vendor Exponea. No price was announced. The deal follows similar combinations including Segment/Twilio, Manthan/RichRelevance, CrossEngage/Gpredictive, Agilone/Acquia, and Emarsys/SAP. Bloomreach also announced a $150 million funding.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)