Building customer journey maps may not be your highest priority activity during a pandemic, but Ansira reports that 39% of companies have maps in place and another 29% are building them. The number of maps is fairly small, though: three-quarters have five or fewer. Biggest obstacles are lack of staff time (41%), data quality (37%) and data silos (32%).
The Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general filed parallel anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook yesterday, alleging violations of federal and state anti-trust laws. The main charge is that buying WhatsApp and Instagram were aimed at removing market competitors to preserve Facebook’s ad monopoly. The long-expected suits may seek divestiture of the two acquisitions and other constraints.
A new University of Cambridge study indicates voice assistants like Alexa, Amazon Echo and Google Home can pick up room noise including keyboard taps that malicious actors might subsequently use to discover your PINs. This is an increasing privacy threat as we add more smart speakers throughout our workplaces and homes.
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.