#user-data

#user-data

"I've always been fascinated by this idea that if people tell you what they want, and you give it to them, it kind of works, versus the more interest-based advertising where you're trying to change people's minds."

Musicboard, an app for music discovery and recommendations, has been struggling, according to its users. Over the past several months, users said the app experienced outages, the website went offline, and the Android app disappeared from the Play Store. This has concerned its devoted, if small, user base. (The app has been downloaded around 462,000 times to date, according to market intelligence provider Appfigures.) On Reddit, users have been recommending alternatives and offering each other support as they wait for any update.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google said its Gemini artificial intelligence assistant can now proactively tap into users' data across Gmail, Search, Photos and YouTube, an attempt to make its consumer-facing AI product more personalized. Using this extensive digital paper trail, the new feature called Personal Intelligence is designed to make Gemini uniquely helpful, Josh Woodward, a vice president overseeing the Gemini app, Google Labs and AI Studio, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday.

The 2025 edition of Spotify Wrapped goes beyond just summarizing what you listened to with charts and infographics. This year, Spotify is also assigning each user a "Listening Age," which is based on the release years of their favorite tracks compared to others in the same age group. The feature quickly went rival, as users recoiled at their seemingly geriatric (or juvenile) musical tastes.

Google utilizes user data "[a]t every stage of the search process," from crawling and indexing to retrieval and ranking. User data further helps Google understand which ads capture users' attention, enabling it to better evaluate ad quality and serve more relevant ads in the future. (finding that users' sessions data "helps to tailor the advertisements that Google delivers to [them]"). These improvements in search quality and ad monetization ultimately translate into higher revenue, as superior search results attract additional users and more targeted ads generate more clicks.

Google has been told by a US jury to pay $425m for violating the privacy of tens of millions of users who opted out of a feature tracking app use. The jury in San Francisco handed down the verdict on Wednesday after a group of Google users accused the tech giant of continuing to collect data from third-party apps even when they changed their account settings to prevent the practice.

Facebook collects a wide range of data from you, including your profile information, posts, photos, comments, likes, friends list, location data, search history and interactions with ads and pages.

These class actions could have a significant effect on how companies engage in digital advertising in the future, and being willfully blind to their progress only exposes companies to increased litigation exposure.

If the goal is to restore competition, Google needs to turn over the user data that it stores.