We end with a Jekyll and Hyde story: ad blocking and virtual private network products from Sensor Tower have been sharing data on the users they are supposed to protect. The leaks were uncovered by BuzzFeed, which reports that many of Sensor Tower apps were removed from Android and iOS app stores for policy violations. Sensor Tower says only anonymized data was shared for analytical purposes.
B2B relationship intelligence platform Affinity has purchased Toronto-based Nudge.ai, a somewhat-similar product which shut down in January. Nudge closed its doors when they still had enough money in the bank to pay off all creditors and return a bit to investors. Did I mention they’re Canadian?
The growth of privacy technology is another trend worth following. The latest news is privacy-safe search engine vendor DuckDuckGo sharing its auto-updated list of internet domains that track people online. The list is 5,326 domains and growing.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.