Employee surveillance prompts $12.7M fine of German tech retailer
Workplace surveillance is seen by regulators as a major violation and growing concern. A Lower Saxony Commissioner just set their highest fine in response to a German laptop retailer found to be recording videos of employees throughout their facility.
A bullish new Markets & Markets report forecasts rapid market growth. Key drivers are needs for: Discovery of structured and unstructured data Keeping pace with privacy regs Improving security compliance COVID-19 data management The pandemic has created strong pressure for businesses to address security concerns, add privacy protections and strategically respond to massive changes in the work environment.
South Africa has raised privacy alarms with a new baby biometrics ID plan. Their proposed policy would collect detailed biometrics, such as photos of eyes, hands, feet, and possibly DNA data on every child born in the country. This would then be linked to parents’ ID numbers and used for all ID documents. Key concerns would be data misuse and the absence of individual consent.
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.)