Microsoft Does the CDP Thing (Who Isn't?); Instagram To Test Nixing Likes

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You Down With CDP?

Microsoft is throwing its hat in the CDP ring (that ring’s getting pretty crowded) with the launch of Dynamics 365 Customer Insight, a cloud-based data and customer identity portability service. Data analysts and marketers are the obvious targets for a product like this, but other departments can also take advantage of marketing metrics using a CDP. Churn risk, customer lifetime value and recommended next best action metrics can “power business processes across the customer journey that help boost personalization and build richer relationships,” wrote James Phillips, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Business Applications group, in a blog post on Monday. The CDP category has morphed in the past couple of years, going from a relatively small, unknown set of startup point solutions to a wide field that includes some of the biggest companies in the world – not to mention a thicket of cross-device data companies that have repositioned as CDPs. Salesforce introduced Customer 360, its version of a CDP, last summer, followed closely by Oracle’s CX Unity. Adobe was late to the game this year, when it released the beta version of its CDP product.

Not Sure If I Like That

Instagram will start running a test to hide like counts in the United States as soon as next week. The photo-sharing app has already been experimenting with nixing likes in Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Italy and Japan over the past few months in an attempt to make its platform safer from a public and mental health perspective and to avoid the spread of misinformation. “It means we’re going to put a 15-year-old kid’s interests before a public speaker’s interest,” said Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri at a Wired conference on Friday. “When we look at the world of public content, we’re going to put people in that world before organizations and corporations.” It’s unclear, though, how brands will react to the change, as they often look at likes as an engagement metric to see how their content is performing. Wired has more.

Is That … Healthy?

Google is working on a secret healthcare project code-named “Project Nightingale,” an AI-based software that intends to collect personal health information from millions of Americans to suggest changes to individual patient care. Google teamed up with Ascension, the country’s second-largest health system, to collect lab results, diagnoses, hospitalization records, including patient names and dates of birth, and more. While it isn’t the first effort by Silicon Valley to get into healthcare, it appears to be the largest, The Wall Street Journal reports – and it’s happening below the radar of doctors and patients. Employees across Alphabet have access to the data, and some Ascension employees have raised concerns about how the data is being collected or shared. Privacy experts, however, confirm that Google’s process is permissible under HIPAA, the federal health privacy and security law which allows hospitals to share data with businesses without alerting patients in order to help carry out healthcare functions. More.

But Wait, There’s More