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.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.