While Pegasus (NSO Group) has been in the news for hacking politicians and journalists, new surveillance groups have been identified for using never-before-seen tactics to quietly hack and steal phone data of critics of authoritarian governments. Predator, from North Macedonian company Cytrox, was found by Citizen Lab and Meta (fka Facebook) to be targeting as many as 50,000 victims in more than 100 countries.
Location intelligence platform Carto has raised a $61 million Series C, bring its total to $92 million. Carto offers both spatial analysis tools and more than 10,000 data sets organized at different geographic levels around the world. Nearly half its data sets provide demographic information, so, yes, this is relevant to marketers.
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (NDPA) fined the gay dating app $7.16 million for violating EU privacy laws, saying it sent personal data to advertisers without user consent. This is the highest fine Norway has issued to date against the company.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)