Pharmacy chain Rite Aid faces a groundbreaking ruling from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which will prohibit the company using facial recognition technology. This follows FTC findings that determined Rite Aid recklessly employed biometric technology to surveil customers resulting in people, particularly women and people of color, being falsely tagged as shoplifters.
A settlement has been reached in the $5 billion Google privacy lawsuit, which is now pending approval by a US federal judge. The amount of the settlement has not as yet been announced. This class action claimed the company misled users into believing Google wouldn’t track their activities when they used Google’s incognito mode, when allegedly, the company did.
The three governing bodies of the EU have reached initial agreement on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), which it is hoped will set a global standard for AI controls in the same way GDPR has done for privacy legislation. However there are concerns that because the current draft is a compromise between stricter, consumer-focused versions favored by the European Parliament and European Commission and the more lenient, industry-friendly terms favored by the European Council, that exemptions included have rendered it less effective.
Media mix models (MMM), originally developed in the 1960’s, have undergone a resurgence as new technologies make them easier to execute and click-based attribution becomes less credible. But evaluating MMM brings its own challenges. Australia-based Mutinex offers a vendor-neutral Open Source MMM Validation Framework which is now available for free to North American marketers and agencies.