Tech
Google’s revised ad targeting plan triggers fresh competition concerns in UK
What is going on with Google’s long-touted migration to an alternative adtech stack (aka its Privacy Sandbox proposal)? What indeed. The entire multi-year endeavour to reshape the commercial web looks dangerously close to being killed off after the latest intervention by the U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
This comes on top of the u-turn that Google made around third-party tracking cookies. Originally they were going to be depreciated; as of July, cookies look like they are here to stay.
The CMA has been probing Google’s Privacy Sandbox plan since January 2021, following a November 2020 complaint by a coalition of digital marketing companies — which is one reason the project has been so tortuously slow. But slow is starting to look like a flat out ‘no’ from the U.K. regulator.
In a case update Tuesday, the CMA’s tossed yet another spanner in Google’s works, writing that it has “competition concerns” about its most recent revisions. Earlier commitments the tech giant had given it would also need to be updated to reflect “the evolution in Google’s planned Privacy Sandbox browser changes”, it said.
Meaning — at the very least — further delays to a project that’s already years over its original schedule.
The CMA said it’s discussing changes with Google, and Google would be required to address its competition concerns — but it has yet to specifying exactly which elements of the revised proposal are not yet meeting the mark. But one thing is clear: Google’s proposed shift to a user-choice architecture is on ice while the regulator weighs impacts.
“If the CMA is not able to agree changes to the commitments with Google which address the competition concerns, then the CMA will consider what further action may be necessary,” the regulator also wrote, again without stipulating what options might be on the table at that point (note: Google already agreed not to end support for tracking cookies without the CMA’s agreement), adding that it will “publicly consult before taking any decision on whether to accept changes to the commitments, and is aiming to do this in Q4 2024”.
The regulator plans to provide an update on what it couches as its “views relating to the Privacy Sandbox tools and its assessment of testing and trialling results” in the last quarter of the year. So that tinkling noise you can hear is the sound of a very battered can being kicked down the road yet again.
Ad targeting: Who gets to choose?
This latest CMA intervention pertains to a revised approach Google announced this summer when the tech giant suggested it might not to kill off third party tracking cookies after all.
Instead, Google suggested it could provide users of its dominant Chrome browser with a choice over whether they want to see ads based on third party surveillance of their web activity (i.e. tracking cookies); or opt for ads targeted using Privacy Sandbox, Google’s alternative tech for personalized ad targeting, which does not rely on cookies to track and profile users.
The implication of Google’s offer was also that its proposed choice architecture for Chrome could let users opt out of tracking-based or personalized ads entirely — i.e. by offering a free choice to say no to any such tracking (and, presumably, be served contextual ads instead). Which would be great news for people’s privacy.
However, the digital marketing companies that have set their sights on derailing Chrome’s deprecation of tracking cookies aren’t likely to be fans of letting web users get that much agency over online ads.
The CMA’s assessment of Privacy Sandbox is also obviously being conducted through a pure-play competition lens — so its jobs is to pay close attention to such complaints.
The competition regulator declined to respond to questions about its approach. But we understand the CMA is concerned Google’s revised plan to present users with a choice could lead to a significant reduction in availability of third party cookies for ad targeting — leading to an increased reliance on alternatives like Google’s Privacy Sandbox tools.
If the concern is that Google could use the Privacy Sandbox project to further entrench its dominance in the adtech stack — including as a result of giving web users more agency to protect their privacy from advertisers — then that’s a competition-shaped problem.
On privacy, the CMA has previously said it’s working with the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the regulator responsible for enforcing national data protection laws, to consider relevant privacy and user choice design concerns. However, as we’ve pointed out before, the ICO has a long history of under-enforcing the adtech industry — despite recognizing its lawfulness problem.
More recently, the ICO’s actions in this area — going after certain types of non-compliant cookie consent pop-ups — have fuelled the rise of another problematic ad-industry dodge: Consent or pay mechanisms. This controversial approach, which is under legal challenge in the European Union, sees web users presented with a consent pop-up that gates content until they either accept tracking or else pay a subscription to access content. So it’s the literal opposite of a free choice.
And what has the ICO been doing about consent or pay? It ran a consultation earlier this year but has yet to adopt a public position on the legality of the controversial business model — letting a privacy-hostile mechanism mushroom unchecked in the meanwhile.
All of which is to say that if the U.K. regulator is the best hope web users have to champion their privacy rights in a high stakes battle for the future of the commercial web — that pits Google against digital marketers plus the CMA sitting in their corner — it doesn’t look like a very fair fight. It’s more like competition is being allowed to dominate a hierarchy of interests.
Reached for a response to the CMA’s latest intervention, Google spokeswomen Jo Ogunleye said the company is engaging with regulators and believes its revised proposal supports competition.
She also emailed a statement in which the company wrote: “We are engaging with the CMA on Privacy Sandbox following the updated approach we’ve proposed, which lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing. As we finalize this approach, we’ll continue to consult with the CMA, ICO and other regulators globally and look forward to ongoing collaboration with the ecosystem to build for a private, ad-supported internet.”
We also sought a response from Lukasz Olejnik, an independent consultant who has been tracking the Privacy Sandbox proposal from the start. “Keeping third party cookies is harmful for user welfare,” he warned, highlighting an apparent change of direction by the CMA.
“I was extremely satisfied with how professionally the CMA approached the migration to a privacy-improved web in ways to respect competition,” he also told TechCrunch. “However, since the last few months I see a significant shift in priorities of enforcement.”
Speculating on what might be behind a shift, Olejnik noted there has been a change of government in the U.K. — but said it’s difficult to explain why the regulator may have reconfigured its priorities in this area.
“Until now the CMA had a full understanding that third-party cookies are problematic for privacy, data protection and trust in digital advertising sector,” he said, adding: “While I believe that a business case for Privacy Sandbox would still exist, such a stance could jeopardise the privacy qualities, and trust in businesses, of UK users.”
Tech
Cathie Wood’s ARK makes its first lead investment in startup Lucra — and it isn’t AI
ARK Invest Venture Fund has made its first-ever lead investment in an early-stage startup called Lucra, firm founder Cathie Wood told TechCrunch.
“We feel pretty excited about it,” Wood (pictured above) said in the recent interview regarding the investment in the startup.
Lucra developed a software platform that reimagines corporate loyalty programs into interactive, esports-like events such as tournaments where customers can play each other, even betting or winning cash or company giveaways. The startup said its customers include Five Iron Golf, Chess Kings, and Dave & Buster’s.
Lucra announced on Wednesday that it raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Astralis Capital, Harlo Equity Partners, Simplex Ventures, SeventySix Capital, and WTI.
There are a few reasons why the famed financial company has never led a startup deal before. For one, the ARK Invest Venture Fund is not a typical VC fund. It’s an SEC-regulated interval fund (also known as a closed-end mutual fund), meaning anyone can invest in it, for as little as $500. However, it is not traded on a public exchange, so investors cannot sell shares at will. They can sell limited shares on specific dates, quarterly.
Wood also noted that the person running the fund, director of research Nick Grous, “is a tough sell,” leaving startups with the difficult task of getting him excited enough to advocate to lead a deal.
What’s even wilder is that ARK was particularly gun-shy about this sort of business because it got burned after investing in a somewhat similar company a few years ago.
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“We had actually owned a company called Skillz, which kind of operated in this space,” Grous said. “It didn’t work out well for us and many other investors.”
Skillz was a once-hot public company that later became mired in troubles and lawsuits. The big difference, the investor said, is that Lucra is a B2B platform, selling interactive esports as a loyalty program, rather than trying to license and run games directly to consumers.
“Overcoming our initial hurdle, especially given our experience with Skillz, overcoming our reticence, having Nick overcome it, that was our first screen,” Wood said of how this startup convinced her company to write a big check.
In this case, ARK Invest had participated in Lucra’s previous Series A round, and had grown familiar with its business model, its trajectory, and its founder and CEO Dylan Robbins, Grous told TechCrunch.
“We had been in constant communication,” Grous said, adding that his venture-esq fund attempts to have quarterly conference calls with the startups in the portfolio, similar to how public companies report to investors quarterly. ARK mostly works in the public market, offering a slate of publicly traded EFT funds.
Despite already being in the portfolio, Lucra’s founder was grilled numerous times when it came time to buy more shares — first by Grous and then ARK’s investment committee, both he and Wood described.
During those calls, Robbins “had thought about all the things that went wrong” with similar companies like Skillz, as well as with Lucra, and had answers, Wood said. “No matter how many times we went at him, his conviction, there was just no let up,” she described.
It also helped that this company’s financials were promising, it was in an area that ARK knew well, and this was not AI, aka the most hyped, most expensive area these days.
“We’ve been underwriting the sports-betting space, understanding the gamification aspects of entertainment,” Grous said, meaning that the investment firm could “really understand the opportunity here.”
The ARK Invest Venture Fund holds shares of companies like Epic Games, Kalshi, and Discord, for instance. It also holds OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, Grok, and Perplexity, so it knows the AI scene well.
“We are all over AI, just like everyone else, because it is a massive revolution,” Wood explained. “But in the process, a lot of companies are being neglected.” This means that spotting such potentially neglected companies is “our opportunity because we are doing research in many other areas than AI,” she said.
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Tech
Cosmetics giant Rituals confirms data breach of customer membership records
Netherlands-based cosmetics giant Rituals has confirmed a data breach affecting customers’ personal information after hackers stole reams of data from its membership database.
The company disclosed the breach on Wednesday, according to an email sent to customers that TechCrunch has viewed and verified.
Rituals said it identified an “unauthorized download” of members’ data in April that contained customers’ full name, date of birth, gender, postal and email address, and phone number, as well as their preferred Rituals store and account type.
When reached by TechCrunch, Rituals spokesperson Eline van Malssen said the hacker stole membership data about customers in Europe and the United Kingdom.
TechCrunch has learned that some customers notified by Rituals are based in the United States. The spokesperson confirmed the incident also affects some U.S. customers.
Rituals did not describe the nature of the cyberattack and the company said its investigation was underway to understand how the data breach happened.
The cosmetics giant is the latest retailer to have customer membership data stolen in the past year, following a string of intrusions at U.K. grocery and shopping chain Co-op and Marks & Spencer, among others. Customer records can be attractive targets for hackers who steal the data and extort the company for a ransom in exchange for not publishing the information online.
When reached with questions about the incident, a Rituals spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company received any communication from the hackers, to share a more precise timeline of the breach, or to provide the exact number of affected members, citing unspecified “security reasons.”
According to its website, Rituals has over 41 million customers in its membership database. The retail giant made €2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in revenue in 2025.
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Tech
Rivian R2 production has started despite tornado damage to factory
Rivian has rolled the first customer-ready R2 SUVs off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof.
Despite the damage, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday morning that Rivian doesn’t expect any delays to the R2’s rollout, which is crucial to the company’s survival.
“The tornado went through the south end of the plant, and ripped the roof off the building, and knocked down some of the plant as well, and so the last 72 hours have been around the clock,” he said. Scaringe explained that Rivian has had to change how and where it brings some materials into the factory to build the R2.
But “we’re not making any changes to the plan,” he said, referring to the company’s production roadmap.
Scaringe wasn’t asked when Rivian will make the first R2 deliveries during the interview. The company has previously said it will start shipping R2 SUVs before the first half of 2026 comes to an end.
Getting the R2 into production is a major milestone for the company. It’s the first production vehicle Rivian has made that has a chance to reach mass-market customers, as it costs far less than the company’s current R1 EVs. It’s also supposed to help the company finally reach profitability after years of losing money on every vehicle it sold.
The company has big expectations for the R2. Rivian told investors earlier this year that it expects to deliver between 20,000 and 25,000 of the SUVs by the end of 2026. If Rivian achieves that, it would become one of the fastest-scaling new EVs ever launched in the U.S., second only to Tesla’s Model Y.
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That said, Rivian is launching with a version of the R2 that costs nearly $13,000 more than the $45,000 price tag the company spent years promoting. The launch edition R2 starts at $57,990, with a slightly cheaper $53,990 variant coming by the end of this year. Rivian won’t sell an R2 for under $50,000 until the first half of 2027, and a true base model starting at $45,000 won’t hit the market until late 2027.
And that’s if the $45,000 R2 ever arrives at all. When Rivian announced pricing for the SUV in March, the company said the base model price will start “around $45,000” — not “at $45,000” as it had promoted on its website as recently as February.
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