Yesterday was Data Privacy Day. I hope you have a great party but will understand if you don’t post pictures. Meanwhile, Cisco last week reported that 65% of companies have seen a delayed sale due to privacy concerns, with an average delay of nearly two months. Companies with more mature privacy processes reported shorter delays. They were also less likely to have suffered a privacy breach. In other words, strong privacy is good business.

Here’s an item that’s more related to the previous one than you might think: a study from Salesforce finds that email marketing and display advertising teams collaborate on technology purchases at 74% of U.S. companies today and plan to collaborate at another 20%. The driver behind this lions-with-lambs comity is use of email addresses to feed advertising audiences to, you guessed it, Facebook. Lots of other interesting information here, including usage of data types, technology, metrics, and new ad channels such as voice devices and wearables.

Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike.  Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else.  Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed.  It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.