noyb (a.k.a The Center for Digital Rights – and short for “none of your business”), the NGO led by Max Schrems, sent 270 complaints to websites that used cookie banners deemed non-compliant with GDPR. This is after the group alerted sites and gave a 60-day grace period to change banners before making public complaints. This is the same group that in 2021 got regulators in Austria & France to declare Google Analytics’ data transfers illegal.
Even deeper in the technical weeds, data transformation framework dbt Labs raised a $222 million Series D, bringing total funding to $414 million. Dbt lets users create programs that it translates into SQL code for database management. Their vision is to create a “semantic layer” that translates between applications and an underlying cloud database. How exciting is that?
Meta & Google seem shocked that Australia thinks Australians would prefer to protect their personal information and risk losing benefits provided by ad-supported apps. What can the government be thinking with regard to plans for the Australian Privacy Law? Meta argues these protections will hurt small business, as it did when Apple conceived of stricter on-device privacy controls (which have proved enormously popular with consumers)…while Google raised a geolocation technicality – stating that restricting addresses would be onerous, and perhaps blocking just postcodes would be sufficient. For whom, one might... Read More >
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.