New research examining what happens after Internet users in Europe land on an ad-supported website and express their “privacy choices” — using a flagship ad industry consent management platform which is supposed to allow them to control the types of ads they receive (i.e. non-tracking vs “personalized”) — has raised fresh questions over the IAB […]
Kalendar AI wants its sales bots to win your next customers
Kalendar AI, a San Francisco-based startup that’s been building on top of GPT-3‘s language model — developing a SaaS for automating lead generation and sales outreach to make it easier for companies to get initial meetings with prospective customers — has raised $3.2 million in pre-seed funding from 500 Startups; The Lean Startup author, Eric […]
Google offers behavioral pledges on news payments in France to try to end costly antitrust litigation
In its latest move to placate European competition regulators, Google has offered a set of commitments to France’s antitrust watchdog — in the hopes of settling a costly (for it) intervention over legally mandated payments for displaying snippets of news publishers’ content. Back in July, France’s Autorité de la Concurrence slapped the tech giant with […]
US wins appeal over extradition of WikiLeaks founder
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is facing the prospect of imminent extradition to the US after the UK High Court granted an appeal by the US government against an earlier (January) refusal by a UK judge to extradite him on mental health grounds. A final decision on whether or not to grant the extradition will be […]
Jobandtalent raises $500M Series E to keep scaling its ‘workforce as a service’ marketplace
Spain’s Jobandtalent, a “workforce marketplace”-cum-digital temping agency which uses AI to match workers to casual labor gigs in sectors like warehousing, ecommerce and logistics, has closed a $500 million Series E round of funding led by Kinnevik and with what it bills as a “significant” follow on by SoftBank VisionFund 2. Existing investors including Atomico, […]
Abacum, a SaaS for finance teams, adds $25M in Atomico-led Series A
Abacum, a SaaS maker geared toward upgrading mid-sized companies’ financial planning and analysis tools, has fast-followed the $7 million seed it raised earlier this year (April) with a $25M Series A round. The latest funding brings its total raised to date to $32M. The Series A is led by European VC Atomico, with participation from […]
UK’s antitrust watchdog orders Facebook to sell Giphy
In a significant push against big tech’s ability to maintain market dominance through sheer buying power, the UK’s competition watchdog has ordered Facebook (now Meta) to reverse its acquisition of animated GIF platform, Giphy — confirming the Financial Times‘ earlier reporting. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said its phase 2 investigation cemented its earlier […]
Italy fines Apple and Google for ‘aggressive’ data practices
Apple and Google have been fined €10 million apiece by Italy’s competition and market authority (AGCM) which has found they did not provide their users with clear enough information on commercial uses of their data — in violation of the country’s consumer code. The regulator also accuses the pair of deploying “aggressive” practices to push […]
UK privacy watchdog warns adtech the end of tracking is nigh
It’s been well over two years since the UK’s data protection watchdog warned the behavioural advertising industry it’s wildly out of control. The ICO hasn’t done anything to stop the systematic unlawfulness of the tracking and targeting industry abusing Internet users’ personal data to try to manipulate their attention — not in terms of actually […]
Europe offers tepid set of political ads transparency rules
It’s been almost a year since the EU’s executive announced it would propose rules for political ads transparency in response to concern about online microtargeting and big data techniques making mincemeat of democratic integrity and accountability. Today it’s come out with its proposal. But frankly it doesn’t look like the wait was worth it. The […]