CDP Institute

Finally, a massive study from Mozilla on the health of the Internet. It reports growing focus on all our favorite worries – privacy, AI, and big tech – and adds Internet censorship and biometric abuse to the mix. Mozilla says the worrying is good because it may lead to improvements. Worth reading.

FullStory, which captures and replays the details of Web site visits, has raised a $32 million Series C funding. Worried about rage clicks or mouse thrashing? They’ve got you covered.

Quantum Metric also captures Web site behaviors. But they’ve just gone a step beyond to allow real-time response to individual actions. So you calm those rage clickers with an offer to help, or at least a cute cat picture. I feel better already.

What’s that, you don’t like someone watching your every mouse twitch? Then privacy-focused browser Brave may be more your cup of tea. They already block most standard display ads and have now launched a program that lets users select which ads to view and get rewarded with blockchain tokens (of course). Ads are targeted based on behavior profiles that are stored on the user’s computer and never shared with the advertiser. It’s like a crazy alternate universe where privacy came first.

Lots of nice funding news today. CDP Blueshift announced a $15 million Series B, bringing its total financing to $30 million. Blueshift calls itself a Customer Data Activation Platform, hoping to clarify that it selects customer treatments in addition to building a unified CDP database.

ChurnZero is a customer success platform that also builds a unified database and uses it to generate insights and kick off retention programs run by customer success agents. They focus on small to mid-size breweries, restaurants and retailers. They’ve just raised a $7 million Series A, bringing total funding to $10 million.

Just-launched Brightback also fights churn, helping high-volume subscription businesses identify customers who are at risk of leaving and intervening with automated retention workflows. The system integrates with CRM, messaging, chat and support systems. Brightback has $11 million in funding.

It’s a slow news day but we can always rely on Facebook. Their latest news is a report that they “unintentionally” uploaded 1.5 million new members’ email contacts without permission, an accident that continued for nearly three years. Sounds like the woman in the musical Chicago whose husband died after accidentally running into her kitchen knife…ten times.

Some tech companies are trying to water down the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) before it takes force next year, but a coalition of 24 tech companies is supporting an amendment to make it stronger. The list includes privacy-focused firms like DuckDuckGo and Ghostery. No sign of Facebook, Google, Amazon or other heavy hitters on that list.

Big tech faces a much tougher regulatory environment in Europe, where new rules hamper American rather than local firms. Fresh from passing copyright reform widely perceived as targeting Google, the European Parliament has added new rules to limit the power of Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook and others who run online marketplaces.

Are you tired of stories about tying online behavior to real-world store visits, Dear Reader? What once seemed magical now seems common. Still, it’s arguably the greatest revolution in marketing measurement since the dawn of mass media. In any case, here’s another one: Location data company Factual has launched a new product that correlates ad exposure to visits, using data from Factual’s graph of 300 million devices. Marketers can compare exposed to non-exposed groups to estimate incremental campaign impact.

Foursquare tracks location of its own panel of 10 million “always on” mobile devices. It has just extended its attribution reporting to include out-of-home media by tracking who comes close enough to an out-of-home display to have seen it. Since Foursquare can already track who visited a store, this new data lets it compare visits among exposed vs non-exposed groups.