For the past few months, we have been experimenting with tags on posts. Our first version of tags included ‘keywords’ derived from the content of the post itself. You can think about these tags as specific words or phrases from the content itself, or phrases that our models associate with the content. When you are browsing in your feeds, you may have already noticed the tags at the bottom of many posts.

You can use these tags as a metadata to help you understand the topics addressed in the post.

Anchors remain our primary organizing unit, but they are relatively…

For the those of you using the @reply feature from Twitter, you may have noticed that your posts have been receiving the ‘From Twitter’ anchor.

When we first launched our ‘@briefly_tldr highlight this’ feature, we were still running on a one to many posts to anchor system. We added the ‘From_Twitter’ anchor to these posts for organizational purposes, and this was no problem, because you could add as many topical anchors as you wanted to the post. …

The Lucid Privacy Group is a leading provider of strategic privacy services for data driven technology companies. We partner closely with our clients, providing ongoing operational support, strategic guidance, and Data Protection Officer services. Our clients typically sit at the emerging edge of digital media, marketing technology, and other venture backed, big data fields.

If you are interested in a role below, and especially if you have privacy pro experience in two or more rapidly growing startups or at least one adtech/marketing tech company, please do not be shy!

Lucid is seeking consultants that can combine Lucid bench strength and…

So we’ve made a rather large architectural change to Briefly that may not be immediately apparent to folks cruising through the application. Until recently, posts had a one to many relationship. You could add multiple anchors to a single post. If you added an article that had significance to Privacy Professionals, Information Security, and EU Data Protection, you could add the url once and then simply add the other anchors to the same post. This means that highlights and comments on the post would be viewable by default across these three anchors.

Now, anchors and posts have a one to…

Oh boy. So Google created a big splash yesterday with their announcement that they will NOT support the variety of cookie replacement technologies already under discussion to keep the adtech industry humming along unchanged post 3rd party cookie deprecation in Chrome. The announcement caused quite a stir in the marketing tech community, with some certain that this spelled the end for shared individual IDs in marketing. Others called this a ‘nothing burger.’ In my view, the announcement was incredibly important, perhaps decisive, but not for the reasons you may think.

We have a lot to unpack …

What we know…

When the CCPA was passed into California law in 2018, California was the only state in the US with a baseline privacy law. As of this week, we have a second. Virginia would like to introduce you to the latest acronym in our privacy alphabet soup: CDPA (“Consumer Data Protection Act”).

Several other sources have written excellent summaries of the CDPA, and I encourage everyone to read through the particulars:

• IAPP
• AdExchanger
• Full text

High-points of the law:

• The CDPA reads very much like a blending of the CCPA and GDPR, with many borrowed terms and functional requirements. There are…

So far, Briefly has been all about highlights. Mostly text highlights, but also image highlights. When you highlight, you are identifying the most important sentences in a post for yourself, for your followers on Twitter and LinkedIn (through the social share feature), and for the community on Briefly, who benefit from the combined highlights of all users.

The UX changes that we launched today focus on making these highlights as easy and fun to produce as possible while also adding a new take on comments.

For the highlighting, Briefly now facilitates highlights directly inline on your feeds. You will no…

Brexit Transition Period

On the 24th December, the UK government and the EU provisionally agreed to the negotiated terms of The Draft EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, avoiding the risks of a no-deal Brexit scenario (still pending ratification by the EU).

However, the draft agreement now provides for a further extended transition period of 6 months, during which time the UK will still be essentially classed as an EU Member State for the purposes of data processing.

What happens now?

Although the EU GDPR no longer applies to the UK, the GDPR has already passed into UK law in the…