SAP Hybris has purchased customer identity management vendor Gigya. TechCrunch reported the price was $350 million. Gigya lets consumers register and then manage their information centrally. This becomes increasingly important as GDPR and similar regulations outside the U.S. give consumers more legal power over how their data is used. As our friends at Equifax have recently demonstrated, consumers within the U.S. have pretty much no data rights whatsoever.

Then again, why should creatives be the only people helped (or replaced) by robots? “Big data-as-a-service company” Qubole has created an autonomous data platform to do data extracts, loads, transformations, stream processing, machine learning, reporting, and ad hoc analysis. How you automate ad hoc is beyond me, but whatever. The core AI skills here are to automatically analyze data use, provide insights about it to human users, and create autonomous agents that take over routine activities.

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.