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.
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.
