France’s data protection agency, the CNIL, has slapped Google and Amazon with fines for dropping tracking cookies without consent. Google has been hit with a total of €100 million ($120 million) for dropping cookies on Google.fr and Amazon €35 million (~$42 million) for doing so on the Amazon .fr domain under the penalty notices issued today. [...]
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techcrunch.com 
Law
A ruling in late October against a little-known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads. The [...]
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techcrunch.com
Law
Unroll.me is to stop serving users in Europe ahead of a new data protection enforcement regime incoming under GDPR, which applies from May 25. In a section on its website about the regional service shutdown, the company writes that “unfortunately we can no longer support users from the EU as of the 23rd of May”, before asking whether a visitor lives in the EU or not. [...]
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techcrunch.com
Law
It seems perfectly reasonable that IBM shot out of the gates like a rocket in a mostly sterile AI market selling to CTOs and newly minted chief data officers with just enough anxiety to open check books. But the reality is that AI isn’t an amorphous black hole that sucks in unstructured data to produce insights. A solid data pipeline and a domain-specific understanding of the AI business problem at hand is table minimum. Coasting on early success won’t cut it in today’s AI-first world where machine [...]
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techcrunch.com
ESP, Intelligence, Trend
Microsoft Connection allows its users to create Mailchimp-like email marketing campaigns. The new service, which is available on the web, Android and iOS, will offer the usual trappings of an email marketing campaign tool, including the ability to manage subscribers, monitor campaign performance (open rates, clicks, new customers, redemptions, etc.) and, of course, create the actual campaigns. While the details about how exactly the service works (and how much it will cost) remain sparse, Microsoft [...]
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techcrunch.com
ESP
Facebook wants replace email as the hub of online identity management in the process. Facebook security engineer Brad Hill announced today at the USENIX Enigma conference that his company is launching an account recovery feature for other websites called Delegated Recovery. Facebook will let users set up encrypted recovery tokens for sites like Github, and if a user ever loses access to her Github account, she will send the stored token from her Facebook profile back to Github, proving her identity [...]
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techcrunch.com
Social
An Executive Order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump in his first few days in office could jeopardize a six-month-old data transfer framework that enables EU citizens’ personal data to flow to the U.S. with the promise of ‘essentially equivalent’ privacy protection once it gets there. [...]
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techcrunch.com
Law
We all took a collective gasp when we saw the price tag of Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn. Now that the dust has settled a bit, we can pause and reflect on what this means from a data, privacy and email perspective — given that all three are potential strengths, weaknesses and concerns arising from the merger of two giants. While at a conference recently, I sat down with my colleague and friend, Dennis Dayman, chief privacy officer at Return Path, and discussed how this deal could change the B2B [...]
[more]
techcrunch.com
Marketing
Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk’s in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to — as its name [...]
[more]
techcrunch.com
Intelligence, Trend
New technology is emerging at ever-increasing speeds, transforming how we communicate, collaborate and manage our day-to-day responsibilities. As soon as we get a strong grasp on the latest workplace technology, an even newer solution surfaces. [...]
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techcrunch.com
Marketing
In case there was any doubt that messaging apps were the future of communication in the mobile-first era, a new study released this morning puts some solid numbers behind their traction – and their increasing dominance over email, among today’s youngest users. According to a report from App Annie, email is effectively dying among this crowd. Those aged 13 to 24 now spend more than 3.5 times overall usage time in messaging apps than those over 45 years old, while the older users still default to apps [...]
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techcrunch.com
Social, Study, Trend
Dear Gmail: Two years ago, you launched an ambitious endeavor with Schema.org to bring a new level of richness to email. Schema.org allowed senders to embed rich meta data in email that allowed any modern email client, not just Gmail, to present actionable items within email. It felt like Gmail was taking the lead in email innovation. [...]
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techcrunch.com
Design, Marketing, Mobile
Google is rolling out a new ad format in Gmail to all advertisers today. A few years ago, Google launched a new kind of native ad in Gmail that sat at the top of the inbox and mostly looked like a regular email. For the most part, that was a pretty unobtrusive way of displaying ads (though some people were rather annoyed by them). Starting today, Google is making it easier for all advertisers to buy these ads. [...]
[more]
techcrunch.com
Trend
Over the past few months, developers have had the door slammed in their face. Facebook shut down their API. LinkedIn has locked down their API, limiting access to a small number of partners who drive revenue for LinkedIn (recruiting related). Twitter has been doing this too, so one would be a fool to build anything reliant on any of these platforms. Snapchat, which only came into existence because of its ability to quickly scrape your social connections, has so far made it clear it will not support [...]
[more]
techcrunch.com
Social
or a while, Gmail data like flight information has been surfaced in Google’s search product. One could imagine that that data would make sense in other places…like Google Calendar. Ding ding! Google announced today that it’s starting to roll out features that will place ticket, flight, hotel and restaurant info onto Google Calendar. Automatically. [...]
[more]
techcrunch.com
Trend
EPiCβ - Rene's daily Email PiCks
