Yelp doesn’t rely on surveillance-based advertising, but they’d like to change that. They have launched a program to target ads at Yelp visitors on non-Yelp platforms based on their Yelp activities. Yelp will serve the ads, so there’s not enough data sharing to break most privacy rules. Consumers may not agree: this recent Jebbit study found 53% of people object to personalized emails based on data they haven’t knowingly shared.
The Washington Post and 16 media partners report Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus military-grade spyware was used to hack smartphones of select journalists, rights activists and business executives. The story, which NSO Group disputes, says these were included on a list of 50,000+ numbers concentrated in countries that surveil private citizens.
One billion dollars is pocket change at Facebook, which just pledged that amount to content creators in an eye-catching headline. But the reality is less impressive: the money is spread across two years and among several convoluted Facebook and Instagram programs. TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube already have similar programs involving hundreds of millions of dollars, so if Facebook hopes to buy its way to dominance, they’ll have to try harder.
Enterprise AI vendor Uniphore has acquired CDP ActionIQ and cloud data engineering system Infoworks. The combination of products will create a Zero Data AI Cloud that simplifies AI deployments by enabling companies to access data for AI projects without moving it from existing systems. Prices were not announced.