Newsroom: Summer 2026

We’re back for a new season (#12 across both channels, heading into our 7th year!), and we do it with a Newsroom update. We will cover our usual five blocks: ePrivacy & regulatory updates; MarTech & AdTech; AI, competition and digital markets; Zero-Party Data; and the future of media. This season’s update includes: - Meta’s “addictive design” of services for minors (public nuisance in New Mexico, trial of twenty nine states in California, DSA charge over addictive design in Brussels) - Social media bans for minors in France, the UK and Australia, and the push to move age checks to the operating system - The second largest GDPR fine to date, against Uber, for deactivating drivers by automated decision (Article 22) - Enforcement across Europe (health data warehouses, traveller profiling, loyalty club consent, scraped business contacts, AI companion apps) and in the US (public, private) - AI Act enforcement begins while obligations for high risk systems slip to 2027, plus EDPB guidelines on anonymization, web scraping and generative AI - The end of FTC independence, doubts over the Data Privacy Framework, and a Google fine answered with tariff threats - Advertising inside AI assistants, pixel matching by default, and AI copyright settlements. All references and links (plus some bonus materials) can be found in a separate blog post available to paid Masters of Privacy subscribers on our website’s Newsroom section (Newsroom Notes: Summer 2026). Our usual disclaimer: the voice that joins Sergio today is a text-to-speech output generated with Eleven Labs. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mastersofprivacy.com/subscribe