Results of a university study of consent management platforms suggests that CMPs are functioning out of compliance with GDPR. CMPs serve pop-ups that ostensibly offer site visitors the opportunity to accept or refuse cookies that track their online behavior, but they also use, as TechCrunch explains, pre-ticked opt-in boxes that effectively turn them into opt-out systems. They also make a good deal of use of implied consent. The researchers looked at the five major providers of CMPs--QuantCast, OneTrust, TrustArc, Cookiebot, and Crownpeak--and concluded that, as deployed, they tend to nudge users strongly toward consenting to their being tracked.
Google has quietly positioned itself as a major collector of health data, the Wall Street Journal reports. There's obviously nothing necessarily nefarious about collecting, analyzing, and using health data ("We want to be helpful" is how Mountain View puts it), but the chances of privacy missteps and abuses are also obvious.
A look back at this year's recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas suggests to TechCrunch that the industry has caught on that privacy is now a major selling point.