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New data privacy laws are forcing marketers to rethink how they handle audience data, including the technologies they use to collect, manage and transact on that information.
Omnicom Group Inc.’s media agency Hearts & Science is expanding the efforts of a new division to help clients with those efforts—and in doing so the agency hopes to beat back increased competition from consulting firms offering similar services.
Marketers have a growing need for technology in these areas as laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation impose limits on how companies can collect and use audience data for advertising purposes.
IKEA will give consumers broad new controls over the way it collects and uses data about them on its digital platforms, the company said.
The initiative will let people decide whether the company can use information such as their IKEA browsing history, previous purchases and product preferences to inform product recommendations in its app, for example, and eventually on its website.
Consumers will also be able to use an incognito browsing mode, tell IKEA how long it can keep their data, and easily delete their data from IKEA’s records, according to the company.
And they will be able to tell IKEA not to use their data, such as browsing history or the items they abandoned in online shopping carts, to target digital ads to them elsewhere, the company said.
Telecommunications operator Vodafone has left Facebook's Libra Association, the group confirmed on Tuesday.
How are the services you use addressing it?
StarRez is the world-leader in providing student housing software including: online web-based student self-service, built-in reporting, room assignments, conference, judicial, inventory, maintenance, and student property management.
Compliance with the CCPA is going to be central to doing business with Californians. Here's how to go about it.
CYDigital has joined the growing list of supporters of the Contract for the Web, led by Tim Berners-Lee The web is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever had to transform our lives for the better — it transforms people’s lives, enriches society and reduces inequality. But never before has its pow
The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.
The co-creator of Facebook's Libra says that once the blockchain-based digital currency is launched users' social media information – and financial data tied to the stablecoin – will not be connected in any way.
Christian Catalini, the head economist at Calibra, the Facebook subsidiary in charge of the launch of Libra and its associated online digital wallet, said that from the beginning the plan for the cash-backed cryptocurrency was to profit from advertising and not the sale of private data.
The slump in optimism around ad tech and martech businesses hasn’t been enough to deter a growing number of advertisers. So far this year, several high-profile advertisers have swooped for companies that sat on the periphery of the ad tech and mar tech sectors. McDonald’s bought personalization platform in March, Walmart snapped up ad tech startup Polymorph Labs to deliver more relevant ads to online shoppers in April, Nike bet on predictive analytics company Celect in August; travel startup OYO Hotels and Homes-bought Danamica, a Copenhagen-based startup that specializes in dynamic pricing through machine learning in September; and the same month MasterCard cut a deal for customer data platform SessionM.
As different as the acquired businesses are to one another, none of them can be described as a core part of an ad tech or martech stack — i.e., a demand-side platform, an ad server, a content marketing platform or search engine optimization tools. None of those types of businesses are easy to manage. Agencies and publishers have tried to make those deals work in the past and struggled to varying degrees. When mobile phone operator Three kicked off a search to acquire a DSP in the first quarter of the year, for example, the procurement process quickly ground to a halt, said one consultant with knowledge of the plan on condition of anonymity. With the latest wave of acquisitions, however, advertisers aren’t trying to shoehorn sprawling ad businesses that weren’t developed with them in mind. Instead, they’re eyeing smaller but arguably more strategic vendors that can turbocharge specific objectives.
The fundamental problem is that, contrary to Facebook’s narrative, Libra is not simply a money transfer scheme. Once launched, Libra will spawn an entire ecosystem of financial services and service providers — authorized Libra dealers, brokers, asset managers, custodians, exchanges, digital identity providers, verifiers and so on — whose identities and qualifications we cannot yet anticipate. These entities may be controlled by Facebook or by other corporate members of Libra Association, operate across multiple financial and commercial markets and not be subject to appropriate supervision and oversight by financial regulators.
Furthermore, will the Libra Association provide some form of liquidity support for these dealers, much like the Federal Reserve does for regulated banks today? This relationship could transform Libra from a “stablecoin” into an elastic (and potentially volatile) currency. It is this type of direct access to the Federal Reserve system that both enables banks in the United States to engage in money-creation and subjects them to extensive government regulation, including legal restrictions on their ability to transact with affiliated entities. Yet none of these regulatory constraints would apply to Libra dealers.
In effect, Libra would become the epitome of a “shadow” banking system (a term commonly used to describe the complex network of financial markets and institutions that replicate banking activities outside the sphere of bank regulation). The Libra Association and its affiliated entities would function as a privately run central bank, with Mark Zuckerberg as the cryptocurrency-era’s version of Alan Greenspan. It is only when we appreciate this dynamic that it becomes clear how truly problematic Libra could be, and why we should take so seriously Facebook executives’ unwavering commitment to plow ahead with their project.
First, through our MSR app, my team asked a group of individuals how concerned they are about the general protection of their privacy. Seventy-four percent said they were either somewhat or extremely concerned. No big surprises here. We went a step further by asking them how likely they’d be to share more data if they felt their privacy was protected, 61 percent indicated that they probably or definitely would.
When we asked our users if they would be willing to share more data if they felt corporations were being more transparent in how they were using the data, we found 77 percent indicating that they probably or definitely would share more.
Here is where things get interesting. Our team also asked how likely they would be to share more data if they were paid fairly for it. Wait for it . . . 73 percent said they probably or definitely would, with only 7 percent saying they would not (the rest being neutral). So the question becomes, do people care about privacy, do they care about being paid, do they care about transparency or something else entirely?
Google announced plans to buy Fitbit for more than $2 billion, and make no mistake, it’s not for the wristbands.
Google has been working on products related to health and medicine for years. Last year, it announced an effort to use artificial intelligence to scan electronic health records, or EHRs, to make predictions about what might happen with hospitalized patients.
Recently, there’s also been a push in the medical field around something called social determinants of health. Those are, for example, how your location, income, education or your commute can have a big impact on your health.
Speaking with MIT Technology Review, Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s head scientist, has now revealed further details about where Alexa is headed next. The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before.
Forget GDPR. Publishers could be in for an even rougher time with the looming ePrivacy Regulation, which will clamp down on how cookies are used for ad targeting, with potentially far-reaching impact for the way digital advertising has operated for over 20 years.
Under the current ePrivacy law proposals publishers and any site owners would need informed consent in order to use any form of cookie. (Under GDPR, there are six different legal bases, albeit two that are used mostly in advertising: legitimate interest and consent.)
An earlier draft also specified that consumers would determine their consent settings via the browsers they used, not publishers directly, making browsers the so-called gatekeepers of consent. That latter part has been deleted in the various revisions, yet numerous European publisher trade bodies, including the European Publishers Council, have stressed their concern that it will be reintroduced.
On Oct. 22, European Union member states will vote on whether or not they agree on the current, revised version of the law. Should they do so, that may speed up the law’s ratification earlier than suspected, according to Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. “It’s looking, alarmingly, like it is speeding up,” she said.
Overview:
Article 2 (see pages 3 through 10) of the California Attorney General's CCPA draft regulations specify certain notices that must be given to consumers at the time of collection of their personal information, including consumers' rights to opt-out of the sale of their personal information, and notices of financial incentives a business may offer in exchange for consumers' personal information. Article 2 also provides specific CCPA requirements for company privacy policies.
Key Elements:
ALL notices given to consumers must meet the following requirements:
Easy to read language that is understandable to an average consumer, and avoid technical or legal jargon
Available in all languages that business provides contracts, disclaimers, etc.
Accessible to consumers with disabilities
Include all required information, or link to the section of the privacy policy that contains the required information
Much of what we term AI today results from the application of Machine Learning to extraordinarily large amounts of data. To be precise, it is the application of so-called Deep (Machine) Learning techniques that has enabled the rise of voice search and voice-activated assistants such as Siri, healthcare innovations in areas such as cancer diagnosis and treatment, face recognition such as AWS Rekognition and the broader areas of image and video analysis and recognition, machine translation including tools like Bing Translator, speech recognition tools and the emergence of the so-called self-driving automobiles and more. Technically, we should call this the Deep Learning resurgence, and not the AI resurgence.
Blockchain platforms have led to incredible advances in the design and development of decentralized applications and systems and have been applied to domains ranging from cryptocurrencies to enterprise supply chains. More importantly, there are two capabilities that blockchains enable due to their inherent decentralized implementation.
First, blockchains provide the ability for users to be in control of their data and to decide when, where, to whom, and for how long to provide access to their data i.e. blockchains are the anti-thesis of systems that intrinsically and automatically exploit the user’s private data. Further, with the advent of Zero-knowledge proofs, blockchains now have the ability to reveal nothing about a transaction except that it is valid.
Second, blockchains are designed without a central authority or system. Therefore, in order to achieve agreement on both data and transactions, blockchains use a variety of fault-tolerant consensus algorithms. While there is an assortment of consensus algorithms, all of them share similar characteristics with respect to achieving agreement across a decentralized set of nodes (or systems). In particular, a variant called Byzantine Consensus addresses the Byzantine Fault Tolerance problem referred to earlier. Blockchains enable the development of AI applications that are not reliant on a single-vendor implementation with all of their concomitant risks and faults.
Together, these two critical capabilities have the potential to enable today’s Machine Learning implementations to address their Achilles Heel and to enable AI applications that are both not privacy intrusive and not susceptible to the single-vendor Byzantine Faults.
A Brief on China's Forthcoming "Cryptocurrency" - CYDigital
Shortly, China will be launching its own cryptocurrency, which may not be a cryptocurrency. China’s big four state-owned commercial banks (the Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and the Agricultural Bank of China) will be the only issuers of China’s CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency). It feels more like a digital replacement for the Yuan than a true cryptocurrency, and it will better facilitate the financial lifecycle for many Chinese citizens since they are heavy users of digital payment system like Alipay. Chinese officials have stated they want to strike a balance between anonymous payments and being able to track money flow to prevent money laundering. This may be disingenuous as China has moved away from anonymous transactions (cash exchanges) and to digital payments at a breakneck speed. It is more likely that the goal is deeper tracking of transactions. “It might be more accurate to say that the PBOC (The People's Bank of China) is looking to release digital cash with extra surveillance.”[1] Reporting notes that the CBDC could look akin to Libra, which may be reflected in two ways: (1) as a system capable of handling very high transaction rates, and; (2) it will be on a permissioned blockchain. It may be a fully private blockchain not just in who has the rights to execute the consensus protocol and decide the mining rights and rewards, but also who maintains and can audit the shared ledger. Some additional notes: - China has been dependent on the USD as the global reserve.
- The new CBDC will be backed by the yuan.
- The yuan is dependent on USD and CBDC is backed by yuan.
- Currency manipulation issues are the main worry for other governments.
- China wants to make CBDC a global currency.
- China’s big four state-owned commercial banks, as well as fintech giants Alibaba, Tencent, Union Pay, and an unnamed company, will be the first batch of organizations to receive the CBDC.
- The PBOC’s Digital Currency Research Lab:
- Launched Shenzhen Fintech Research Institute;
- Went on a hiring spree for blockchain architects and cryptography specialists;
- Filed more than 50 patent applications to detail the potential design of the state-backed digital yuan system but will strip off most cryptocurrencies’ anonymity and decentralization features.
[1] Roger Huang, “China's Digital Currency Is Unlikely To Be A Cryptocurrency,” Forbes, 8/14/19, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerhuang/2019/08/14/chinas-digital-currency-is-unlikely-to-be-a-cryptocurrency/#4d4a3f8c6a52
If the bill were a law during Facebook’s privacy scandals, Mark Zuckerberg would face jail time, Sen. Ron Wyden says.
On Wednesday October 9, in Revenue Ruling 2019-24 the IRS delivered on some of those promises, publishing a Revenue Ruling on the tax treatment of forks and related airdrops and posting an accompanying information circular on its website providing a list of frequently asked questions and answers (“IRS Q&A”) that, among other things, addresses methods for determining a taxpayer’s basis in cryptocurrency. While the IRS Q&A appears to be mostly non-controversial, the treatment of forks and airdrops is likely to be the subject of debate.
With libra, the social-media giant promised to change payments world-wide. Instead, major partners bolted after lawmakers and regulators challenged its plans, an early sign of how Washington is putting Facebook on a tight leash.
Why privacy legislation is hard: No one knows how much privacy is worth.
The attorney general's office can begin enforcing the California Consumer Protection Act in July, six months after its enactment.
Blockchain for lead generation delivers the ability to source leads and share information using a decentralized platform in a peer-to-peer network. This is the first time blockchain is entering into the sales world, and it has the potential to have a transformational impact on the business and how sales organizations typically source leads and contact information.
Rather than sourcing from many unreliable third-party databases, users can instead take part in a network sharing system to source leads and contacts that fit their organization, while selling leads that do not conform to their ideal customer profile to other companies that may need that lead. Currently, sales leaders will not find many vendors offering blockchain for lead generation. However, in the meantime, they can learn more about its potential use cases and prepare for an increase in the vendor landscape.
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The pressure from data privacy legislation is causing agencies and users to change their tactics. Here's proof.