All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Facebook adds CCPA compliance extension

🔍 Facebook adds CCPA compliance extension

Jul 30, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, will anything come from yesterday's hearings?

The House's antitrust hearings with the CEOs of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook on Wednesday hit many notes that will ring familiar. Google has evolved from a "turnstyle" to the web to a "walled garden" that increasingly shows results that are more profitable to Google — ads and its own sites, said subcommittee chair David Cicilline of Rhode Island.

Google's Sundar Pichai responded predictably, saying the company always focuses on giving users the most useful information and that most searches don't result in ads.

Jeff Bezos was peppered with a surprising number of questions about its marketplace and concerns about its "monopoly power" as both operator of the platform and retailer competing with third-party sellers. Will any antitrust actions come from all of this? We'll have to see if Congress has the appetite. Wisconsin's Jim Sensenbrenner made the case that consumers are better served by Google and Amazon being one-stop-shops but added that the FTC could relook at past acquisition approvals and find that it made mistakes.

A heads up to Facebook advertisers affected by CCPA: the default enablement of Limited Data Use is set to expire on Sunday. Facebook has added the option to extend LDU to October 20 in the Events Manager. If CCPA applies to you and you haven't updated your Pixel to flag California users, you'll want to consider checking that new option.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Hearing highlights

Some other highlights from Wednesday's antitrust hearings:

Cicilline also raised concerns that Google "steals content" and uses its ability to surveil vast amounts of data to "identify competitive threats and crush them." Pichai, again predictably, disputed the claims and said it uses data to improve results.
Tim Cook of Apple, said the App Store is just another feature of the iPhone, like the camera.
Bezos said Amazon does have policies preventing internal access to third-party seller data for its own private label brands, but couldn't say it hadn't violated those policies. Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Mary Gay Scanlon and Ken Buck were among those who pressed Bezos on its use of third-party data to inform and market its own proprietary products and brands.
Val Demings of Florida pressed Pichai on Google's decision to combine data from web traffic and Google's properties in 2016 after saying it would not do so when it acquired DoubleClick in 2007. Pichai said users can turn ads personalization on and off and Google has made it easy for them to control their data.
Zuckerberg said the environment has become even more competitive for Facebook since 2012.

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Search Shorts

Google smart displays show how-to schema

How-to schema on Google smart displays. It looks like Google is testing showing pages with how-to schema on Google Home Hubs and Google Smart Displays, they even show in the rich results testing tool. But it does seem like it is an offshoot of the recipe interface.

Samsung giving more Galaxy to Google. According to Bloomberg, Samsung and Google are discussing giving Google more visibility on the smartphone maker's best-selling handsets. The deal would potentially include search, the Google Assistant and Play Store. If true, the move would raise antitrust objections in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.

Local Q&A box. It looks like Google is testing a new local Q&A box outside of the local knowledge panel.

Google Doodle disappears. Yesterday, Google was supposed to have a wear a mask Doodle on its home page, but it was quietly pulled down and we do not know why.

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