EasyJet rides digital and mobile on Brexit currency pressure

Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, and Teams are set to automatically load data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRMs using a product launched by the Redmond-based software and cloud giant today.

Dubbed Viva Sales, the product is built on the employee experience platform Microsoft Viva — launched last year — and is designed to let sales teams tag customers in Outlook, Teams or Office applications to allow data to be captured as a customer record in the CRM system.

Currently available on preview, the product syncs with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamic CRM out of the box, but customers of Oracle and SAP CRM product will have to wait for sufficient customer demand before Microsoft integrates the system with their sales software, Emily He, Microsoft corporate VP for business applications marketing, told The Register.

WWDC Apple this week at its Worldwide Developer Conference delivered software development kits (SDKs) for beta versions of its iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9 platforms.

For developers sold on seeking permission from Apple to distribute their software and paying a portion of revenue for the privilege, it's a time to celebrate and harken to the message from the mothership.

While the consumer-facing features in the company's various operating systems consist largely of incremental improvements like aesthetic and workflow enhancements, the developer APIs in the underlying code should prove more significant because they will allow programmers to build apps and functions that weren't previously possible. Many of the new capabilities are touched on in Apple's Platforms State of the Union presentation.

Salesforce has previewed a bunch of updates to its Customer 360 platform promising close integration with external data sources including Google ads, ecommerce marketplaces and social media.

Using Salesforce Customer Data Platform, the update is intended that clients will be able to use their internal data to create a customer profile to build marketing campaigns on Google Ads.

The CRM giant argues that joining data held on its system with Google Ads will help customers personalize marketing campaigns using first-party data instead of cookies and, in the future, incorporate more detailed analysis at the Customer Data Platform interface. The feature will be available in a few months, the company said.

From May 2019 through August 2020, the mobile app published by multinational restaurant chain Tim Hortons surveilled customers constantly by gathering their location data without valid consent, according to a Canadian government investigation.

In a report published Wednesday, Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) of Canada and the privacy commissioners from three provinces – Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec – presented the results of an inquiry that began shortly after the publication of a June 2020 National Post article.

That article revealed the Tim Hortons app tracked location data every few minutes even when relegated to the background, and the report compiled by Canadian privacy officials confirmed as much.

Right-to-repair advocates are applauding the passage of New York's Digital Fair Repair Act, which state assembly members approved Friday in a 145–1 vote.

The law bill, previously green-lit by the state senate in a 49-14 vote, now awaits the expected signature of New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D).

Assuming the New York bill becomes law as anticipated, it will be the first US state legislation to address the repairability of electronic devices. A week ago, a similar right-to-repair bill died in California due to industry lobbying.

While Apple has, temporarily at least, backed away from last year's plan to run client-side scanning (CSS) software on customers' iPhones to detect and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to authorities, European officials in May proposed rules to protect children that involve the same highly criticized approach.

The European Commission has suggested several ways to deal with child abuse imagery, including scanning online private communication and breaking encryption. It has done so undeterred by a paper penned last October by 14 prominent computer scientists and security experts dismissing CSS as a source of serious security and privacy risks.

In response, a trio of academics aims to convey just how ineffective and rights-violating CSS would be to those who missed the memo the first time around. And the last time, and the time before that.

Global CRM giant Salesforce has reported first quarter revenue of $7.41 billion, up 24 percent on the same period last year.

In doing so, the SaaS vendor eschewed some of the market gloom emanating from fellow travelers such as Workday and SAP.

While gross profits increased to $5.37 billion from $4.41 billion, up 22 percent, net income fell to $28 million from $469 million.

Around 4,000 Salesforce staff have signed an open letter calling for the CRM giant to stop working with the National Rifle Association, the powerful US gun-lobby organisation.

The calls to senior management at Salesforce come in the wake of the 24 May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two adults dead.

The letter sent to co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor, CFO Amy Weaver, and CMO Sarah Franklin has attracted more than 4,000 signatories, according to reports.

At the Workshop on Offensive Technologies 2022 (WOOT) on Thursday, security researchers demonstrated how to meddle with AirTags, Apple's coin-sized tracking devices.

Thomas Roth (Leveldown Security), Fabian Freyer (Independent), Matthias Hollick (TU Darmstadt, SEEMOO), and Jiska Classen (TU Darmstadt, SEEMOO) describe their exploration of Apple's tracking tech in a paper [PDF] titled, "AirTag of the Clones: Shenanigans with Liberated Item Finders."

The boffins discuss tools they've developed and released to advance the exploration of AirTag hardware and firmware, made possible by existing imperfections.

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, has warned that proposed changes to Britain's data protection rules must not put the flow of data between the EU and the UK at risk.

The professional body said the supposed benefits of a leaner data protection regime – something the government promised last week – should not come at the expense of the UK's current "data adequacy" arrangement with the EU.

The UK remained compliant with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when it formally left the EU at the end of 2020. Its interpretation of EU law meant that the trading bloc gave the UK an "adequacy" ruling, permitting data sharing across the border.