Commerce Signals builds ad audiences based on anonymized credit and debit card data.  But targeting households based on their actual purchases would be a privacy violation, so they use the purchases to find a sample of households in a target group, build a look-alike model of that sample using less sensitive data, and sell the look-alike audience.  They just made the audiences available in the LiveRamp data marketplace.

Google’s long-awaited plan to block third party cookies might be derailed by the UK’s competition authority.  The possible action reflects industry concerns that the loss of third-party cookies would give Google an advantage, since it can collect much data directly.  Expect more conflict between competition and privacy as both issues are taken more seriously.

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.