A group of Harvard students experimented with AI-linked eyeglasses, offering a powerful peek into the AI nightmares coming for IT in 2025.
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The adoption of generative AI is moving too quickly — and its dangers remain too unknown — for any meaningful rules to be put in place on AI vendors. Regulating enterprises makes far more sense; influence enterprise behavior and the vendors will follow.
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Thursday's announcement of the deal adds to the all-but-infinite list of global AI compliance rules that enterprises must somehow master.
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Just about every generative AI vendor offers enterprise CIOs all kinds of promises about the technology. But they're talking up 2026 capabilities when trying to make 2024 sales. That's a recipe for disaster for both buyer and seller.
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Although being removed from Dow would be entirely symbolic, it is the last thing Intel needs now as it is fighting a perception game to remain relevant in the enterprise.
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It's all a matter of understanding how your business can benefit from generative AI tools and platforms. But first, you need to make some difficult decisions — and then hope genAI doesn't self-destruct.
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CIOs are so desperate to stop generative AI hallucinations they'll believe anything. Unfortunately, Agentic RAG isn't new and its abilities are exaggerated.
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How can CIOs tell customers what data is being collected about them and how it is being used if the CIOs themselves don't know exactly what their genAI tools are doing?
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Instructions must be explicit and not subject to interpretation. Some question how effective an instruction to “not hallucinate” will be.
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Many organizations have experienced atrocious ROI for generative AI efforts, but that's because they've been thinking the wrong way about both genAI and the kind of ROI they can expect from it.
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In many ways, the rush to try out still-evolving generative AI tools really does feel like the Wild West. Business execs need to slow things down.
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Generative AI advocates say genAI tools can catch errors made by other genAI tools — but humans must still check the AI checkers' work.
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As US representatives try to negotiate with Japan and the Netherlands to deny China the tools to make faster chips for AI work, some observers doubt they will succeed.
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If you can't trust the product, can you trust the vendor behind it?
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Corporate privacy policies are supposed to reassure customers that their data is safe. So why are companies listing every possible way they can use that data?
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Controlling genAI is critical for IT leaders. But is there any effective way to do it?
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It's bad enough when an employee goes rogue and does an end-run around IT; but when a vendor does something similar, the problems could be broadly worse.
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Given the plethora of privacy rules already in place in Europe, how are companies with shiny, new, not-understood genAI tools supposed to comply? (Hint: they can't.)
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From unfettered control over enterprise systems to glitches that go unnoticed, LLM deployments can go wrong in subtle but serious ways.
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As much as enterprises love their anti–phishing training programs, they somehow don't think about them when they communicate with their customers on important operational efforts. Many routinely send messages that look and act exactly like phishing messages.
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When McDonald's in March suffered a global outage preventing it from accepting payments, it issued a lengthy statement about the incident that was vague, misleading and yet still allowed many of the technical details to be figured out.
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Wall Street's obsession with quarterly earnings has made it extraordinarily difficult for most enterprises to spend on long-term investments, or even mid-term investments.
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Ever use one of those mobile food delivery apps — only to realize your delivery person isn't who you expected? There's a lesson here about identity, authentication, and what happens when the best laid tech plan meets human beings.
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The IT community is freaking out about AI data poisoning. For some, it's a sneaky backdoor into enterprise systems as it surreptitiously infects the data LLM systems train on — which then get sucked into enterprise systems.
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The New York Attorney General's office sued Citibank for failing to reimburse customers victimized by fraud, raising serious issues all enterprises must figure out. When should a customer be reimbursed for fraud? And at what point do a customer's actions come into play?
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One of the oldest and most frustrating rules about email spam is that the unsubscribe link never works — all it does is confirm your email address is active. But what if the unsubscribe failure is caused by something far more problematic?
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It's no secret that enterprise IT in recent years has been disappointed in corporate clouds. But in general they've not done anything about it. That could soon change.
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As generative AI fever continues to mesmerize enterprise executives, those same execs are insisting that IT somehow make it happen.
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The idea that vendors lie a lot is, as the saying goes, “a tale as old as time.” But to suggest vendors are so persuasive because they actually believe their falsehoods — now, that's intriguing.
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Zoom stirred up a kerfuffle this month when it amended its terms of service to make execs comfortable that it wouldn't use Zoom data to train generative AI models. In reality, it was really doing spin control worthy of the sleaziest politician.
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As details about the recent China attack against US government agencies come to light, two details stand out: Microsoft failed to store security keys properly — and the keys were used by attackers even though they'd already expired.
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In many ways, lawyers, CIOs and CISOs have the same mission: protect the enterprise from forces that want to do harm. But those two professions often approach the task in such polar opposite ways that they fight each other instead of the bad guys.
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Gaining visibility into anything IT—related is always difficult, but the age-old nemesis, shadow IT, remains a major problem — especially as the enterprise environment has changed.
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If coders lied as often as ChatGPT, they would be fired immediately. Stunningly, some enterprise execs seem to be just fine with that — as long as AI continues to code quickly and for so little money.
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Using generative AI to code is dangerous for a variety of reasons, but its efficiencies will tempt corporate leaders — especially CIOs and business execs — to use it anyway. A senior AWS executive at Amazon argues the decision doesn't have to be an either/or calculation.
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As we've seen with other highly-hyped technologies — such as the Web back in ‘95 and blockchain more recently — companies can get ahead of themselves when they jump into investments based on things other than strategic goals.
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A compliance fight between Microsoft and German regulatory authorities has gotten white hot, though it looks as though any penalties might bypass the company and take aim at its customers.
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Biometrics are supposed to be a fundamental pillar of modern authentication. Unfortunately, for a wide range of reasons and in a variety of ways, many biometric implementations are wildly inaccurate.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly fades — and the rush to cloud solutions it hastened now seems less critical to business success — a question arises: Has anyone on your team recently run an ROI analysis to see whether the cloud truly saves your company money?
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This goes beyond simply not trusting location data for cybersecurity authentication. Geolocation is now used for a wide range of business reasons — but it shouldn't be.
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The US Federal Reserve and the US Senate are both looking to lessen restrictions on retailers — ostensibly to rein in card fees. What they actually are doing is inviting more fraud.
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The European Union is cracking down on cryptocurrencies. That could have massive implications for enterprise IT.
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Microsoft is backing off its support for some AI-driven features, including facial recognition. Although it's good Microsoft is acknowledging discrimination and accuracy issues, it had years to fix the problems and didn't.
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There are disturbing reports that some major financial institutions are no longer crediting back all fraudulent transactions, even when the victim has filed a police report. This move by these financial institutions will soon come back to bite them.
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C-level execs argue a fine game about caring about their employees — but those platitudes somehow never make it into the HR meetings about bonus benchmarks.
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What if smartphone sound-recognition could be tweaked to do core IT and operational chores? This would be an option to customize the phone to listen for sounds specific to your company.
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It's not often that you see two cybersecurity vendor CEOs agree on an issue — and yet get into a very public insult-fest with each other. Then again, this did start at RSA, so anything is possible.
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A June report from an analytics firm has Amazon knocking Walmart out of its No. 1 retailer slot by 2024. Walmart bet on a store-based approach years ago, but consumers changed their habits and Walmart is soon to pay the price.
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Given that one of the uglier threats to enterprise cybersecurity involves re-purposed third-party code and open-source code, you might think that Google addressing the issue would be a big help. Think again.
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The US Department of Justice last week reversed its own policy, telling prosecutors not to prosecute anyone who has engaged in "good-faith security research."
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Apple has changed its self-repair program and has gone out of its way to make the program a horrible option for its intended audience: consumers. But it might make a lot of sense for enterprise IT wanting to do iOS device repairs.
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The recent corporate pushback against working from remote locations (referred to, unfortunately, as work from home) is both self-destructive and bizarre.
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In a case involving LinkedIn, a US appellate court has come to an obvious conclusion: scraping publicly-visible online data and content doesn't violate The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. What does it mean? That's where things get interesting.
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Have you recently been on a video call, muted and then said something nasty about a client — or maybe even the boss? Were you confident the mute button was protecting your secret? You shouldn't have been.
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Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, acknowledged Apple has dramatically slowed down auto updates — by as much as a month.
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With the threat of Russian cyberattacks still with us, companies need to be on a war footing when it comes to security.
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Time is of the essence when a data breach occurs. The tricky part is figuring out exactly when a company first knows about a breach, and how long it has before making it public.
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CVS Pharmacy has a widely used app and site to schedule various vaccinations, including for COVID-19. The problem? It has a glitch that allows customers to schedule appointments that are then cancelled without explanation.
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One of the best authentication methods today relies on behavioral analytics, especially when it's used as part of continuous authentication. But it is getting a bit trickier to do so reliably.
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It's not simply about getting easy permission to go when it's time to part ways; it's about IT making sure any decisions don't complicate that eventual departure.
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Ever since its layoffs last summer and a plunge in quality, Rackspace lets customers in — but won't let them out. A cautionary tale of a business that had to fight like heck to escape.
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Much of mobile security advice these days is for users to be careful, not click on suspicious links nor open suspicious emails or attachments. But the growing popularity of no-click attacks sidesteps these defenses — and Google has drilled into one such attack.
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Apple has a complicated relationship with privacy. It loves to tout its efforts, especially as a differentiator with Google. But actually delivering privacy? That's a different story.
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It's a sad fact of mobile authentication: the industry tends to initially support the least effective and secure options. Take the recent case of the sleeping woman in China, for instance.
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The mobile app security headaches continue. This time it's spyware found by mobile security firm Zimperium that not only steals data, but can silently control mic and camera — and secretly delete security apps. Fun times.
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Apple, Google, and especially Visa this month have given us yet another example of how security and convenience are at odds in the mobile world. Convenience seems to have won out.
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Another day, another revelation that mobile vendors might not always have users' needs in mind, but they sure are helpful to cyberthieves.
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A security researcher found that an open area for typing in a phone number has unintentionally turned AirTags into God's gift to malware criminals.
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I've always been impressed by how clever Apple can get when trying to protect its repair revenue. A new report from MacRumors doesn't disappoint.
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While Google has announced plans to reset permissions for older, rarely used Android apps, Apple's app-tracking-transparency efforts in iOS have fallen short of the company's grand vision.
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Apple has unveiled plans to use its extensive powers to fight child pornography. Even though it has good intentions, the company's actual plan has given people dozens of reasons to oppose the move.
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As if IT needs more reminders that apps in app stores may not be secure, a Netherlands security firm has found a new Android dropper app dubbed Vultur. It offers, and delivers, legitimate functionality, then shifts into malicious mode when it detects financial activities.
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When it comes to keeping everyone in the company on the same page, IT could be doing more. That's especially true when making sure mobile devices are secured.
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When spyware from an Israeli firm was discovered on a number of iPhones used by journalists, critics hit Apple over security and privacy concerns. But in this case, it doesn't look like the company did anything wrong.
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It's deeply unsurprising that newly-released information from the Attorney General's office for Arizona — released when a judge agreed to unseal some of the data — shows Google trying to hide privacy settings and tracking users after they chose to not be tracked.
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In cybersecurity, one of the challenging issues is figuring out when a security hole is a big deal or is trivial. Apple now has a hole that pushes the definition.
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Google is moving — slowly — to make multi-factor authentication default, pushing FIDO-compliant software embedded within the phone, and even has an iOS version. Nice touch.
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A university study found that a frequently-heralded smartphone claim by both companies is non-existent. This raises a serious question: Don't they have to prove something works before shouting it from the highest virtual rooftop? Doesn't the FTC have anything to say about this?
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Remember all of the security corner-cutting forced on us in March 2020 as companies scrambled to deal with the pandemic? It's time now to go back and fix things.
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Given that law enforcement can leverage a hole in Mozilla open-source code that Apple used to permit accessories to be plugged into an iPhone's lightning port, IT and enterprise security pros need to view mobile device security differently.
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One of the best tech support programs in the industry has been Dell's ProSupport program, which routinely answers within 10 seconds and offers excellent techs who truly try to help. It also offers a next-day onsite repair program that's impressive. But (you knew there was a catch, didn't you?), no program is perfect.
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For years, security experts have been sounding the alarm about texting numbers for authentication. Now, due to some excellent work from Vice, it's clear the text situation is far worse than we thought.
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WhatsApp does not treat all interaction data the same. For now, user-to-user/customer-to-customer/consumer-to-consumer messaging is encrypted and considered private. But when a user communicates with a business, Facebook can do anything it wants. Users must assume that a message to a business is potentially open to all.
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Apple's upcoming iOS 14.5 and WatchOS 7.4 OSes will allow masked enterprise employees to access their iPhone if they happen to be wearing an Apple Watch that is unlocked. If companies don't stop workers from using this convenience, it will materially scale back security.
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Apple itself has issued a warning that its newest iPhone could attack your heart — literally.
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In recent years, the feds have stopped asking for a workaround to get past Apple security. Why? It turns out that iOS, along with Android, is simply not as secure as those companies suggested.
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Multi-Factor Authentication has become so common a security tool that many users assume it must work well to protect data and communications. What it really does is provide false comfort.
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Now that Apple has agreed to pay $113 million to settle with iPhone users whose smartphone clockspeed was artificially slowed to boost hardware sales, it's worth examining why the move was so colossally stupid.
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When it comes to whether enterprise IT should seriously consider this purchase — for those operations where BYOD hasn't yet alleviated the need to buy phones ever again — it doesn't make sense for most.
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Max Krohn, Zoom's head of security engineering, detailed what users need to give up to get the better encryption protection that's coming.
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Mobile apps galore have used crowdsourcing techniques this year to fight COVID-19. Now, a new app wants to build on those efforts by identifying communities (often down to the Zip Code) that are being aggressive or lenient in mask-wearing.
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Two European banks are looking to boost security by layering a pair of biometric authentication methods — facial recognition and palm recognition — atop one another. That could mean more security, or more headaches for users.
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When Apple rolled out its planned changes for iOS 14 and its companion WatchOS 7, it included a variety of interesting tweaks. Two stood out as especially interesting: a COVID-friendly Watch handwashing app and an enterprise-IT-friendly facial recognition app for video cameras and doorbells.
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Efforts by people to avoid getting COVID-19 are already affecting mobile payments, particularly contactless NFC payments. Since shoppers now want to avoid going inside stores, even briefly, app payments that happen far away from a POS system are picking up.
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As governments consider COVID-19 contact tracing and its privacy implications, it's not a bad idea for companies to take the opportunity to look more closely at their mobile agreements with employees.
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One of the most frequently asked questions these days is "When will things get back to normal?" And the fair and valid answers are generally "They won't. Good-bye handshakes" and "In stages, ending when a vaccine is approved and widely distributed." When it comes to payments, the answers are more complicated, but not any more comforting.
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IT execs need to start talking with other C-levels now and figure out what they want their post-COVID company to look like.
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The pandemic means there is no time for security niceties, such as properly processing RFPs for apps that were thoroughly vetted. That brings us to MFA and why it has to be radically re-envisioned.
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Autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles are making serious progress, but they are going to run head on into a massive obstacle: human trust.
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Amazon is experimenting with a way to allow shoppers to use a palm-print biometric to authenticate payments and to do so in physical stores far beyond Amazon-owned brick-and-mortars. Amazon is reportedly looking at QSRs (quick-service restaurants), especially coffee shops.
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Purdue University has an interesting mobile concept, a means to free up lots of space that is now housing apps and app data. Why not, the university asks, stream the apps themselves from the cloud?
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The latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report eloquently argues that aside from wireless, the form factor of mobile in and of itself poses security risks.
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Employees and consumers are being more careful about sharing information that goes beyond strict need-to-know. We ran into one company that seems to not get that.
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A massive number of text messages were stored in plaintext, with no security at all.
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And a very different bug, planted by cyberthieves, presents even more frightening camera-spying issues with Android.
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The best security approaches — such as continuous authentication — are invisible to the user and therefore frictionless. That's good in practice, but it can be bad in terms of customer perception. If they don't see it, they assume it's not there.
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Sometimes, a mobile glitch is indicative of a much more pervasive issue. Our columnist's recent iPhone 11 iTunes headache perfectly illustrates how Apple's heralded focus on customer experience falls apart when doing upgrades.
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It's a mystery because being more accessible is just good for business.
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The internet of things brings with it a wide range of IT security headaches, along with compliance nightmares — and turf wars.
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A new study questions the efficacy of car accident-avoidance systems, but it's possible that a simple smartwatch might be part of the solution.
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In BYOD environments, users tend to supplement corporate security programs with free versions. That is a remarkably bad idea, and one analyst report suggests a way to stop it.
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Would changing mobile warranty rules be a good or bad thing for enterprise IT?
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Ready for the mobile security news that IT doesn't want to hear about but needs to? When security firm Positive Technologies started pen testing various mobile apps, security holes were rampant.
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Google confirmed that cyberthieves had managed to pre-install malware into the Android framework backdoor. In short, the malware appeared to be blessed by Google at the deepest point within Android.
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Mobile banking should be effortless, but Forrester Research says far too many banks offer frustrating apps and give little thought to how consumers should interact with their financial institutions.
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The Apple Watch is still a wonderful device that has maddening flaws. But we have now found some unpublicized ways around some of those flaws. Watch life is now slightly better.
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In a perfect world, the Apple Watch Series 4 could be great. With a few easy settings, a glance at the watch would deliver time, temperature, the dial-in details for your next appointment or many other things that would be helpful. But we don't live in a perfect world.
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A new report from a well-regarded payments consulting firm has found a lengthy list of security insanity while examining several major fintech company mobile apps.
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With its enterprise developer certificate program, Apple chose convenience over security. You can guess what happened.
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A bunch of apps from some major players were recently tripped up by a security/privacy hole from a third-party analytics app. But everyone is focusing on the wrong lesson.
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Making apps downgradable would give IT just a little of its environment controls back. Just a little bit, but it's a start.
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In 2019, executives need to look anew at mobile and figure out what technology displacements make sense. For example, do companies need to buy expensive dedicated barcode scanners?
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Although Apple is trying to position itself as the consumer-privacy-friendly company, some have complained that it is doing it in far too heavy-handed a way.
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When eBay recently started giving customers the option to move away from paying with PayPal, something interesting happened.
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Police are very persistent in trying to gain access to suspects' devices.
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Users are jumping to the latest iOS version faster than ever before. That means many things from an Apple marketing perspective, but for IT, it means far greater security.
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With iOS 12, Apple wants to share the ease-of-use magic of Apple Pay with the industry, via an SDK. Well, not quite, but it's starting along that path.
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Apple's letter was designed to alleviate congressional fears about the company invading its customers' privacy. But a close reading of the letter does the opposite.
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There are good and bad reasons to track someone's movements, but the best way to scream to users that you're spying on them is to lie about or not reveal what you're doing.
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Gesturing in the air near a mobile device is going to become the preferred mode of interaction. Long term, ease of use will soar, but before we get there, expect a lot of user errors.
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An Arizona security company is working on an interesting approach to mobile authentication, one that leverages the exact angle a user holds the phone as a means of making replay attacks a lot more difficult.
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As the battle for cashier-less stores rages on, it's worth questioning whether an employee-less checkout system is something that retailers should truly want.
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Sniffing smartphones won't merely replicate what a human nose can do. They will be able to detect aromas far more precisely. What is the enterprise IT potential here? Quite a bit.
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Amazon has confirmed that one of its Echo devices recorded a family's conversation and then messaged it to a random person on the family's contact list. The implications are terrifying.
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When BJ's Wholesale Club on Thursday (May 3) said that it would leverage machine learning in its mobile app, it joined the crowded club of companies boasting A.I. capabilities while remaining vague on the details.
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One of the longest-running retail problems involves loyalty points and gift cards and the fact that shoppers tend to either forget about them or find them too much of a hassle to redeem.
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In-aisle checkout gets a big push from the world's largest retailer.
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Texting confirmation numbers is a very weak link; texting them to my landline is just dumb.
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Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa have found quite a few new security holes in the popular 4G mobile networks.
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With a smartphone and an RFID tag on the window, shoppers may be able to forgo using plastic at all gas stations and drive-through restaurants. But will they?
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The PCI Council is allowing the most sensitive part of a payment card transaction to happen on a device that it acknowledges is highly dangerous and unstable.
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Now comes yet another reason to respect the heck out of your privacy policy: The U.S. Supreme Court is considering making it a determining factor for whether your customers have an expectation of privacy.
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Visa has learned this lesson, but Kroger is still resisting.
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What Apple did not choose to say is far more illuminating than what it did say.
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A U.K. firm is pushing mobile software that watches you while you fill out a form and tries to determine truthfulness and emotion. George Orwell would be proud.
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AR is a nice retail mobile add-on, but what Williams-Sonoma needs more is to address retail fundamentals. W-S, look to Amazon for an example.
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In the world of online publishing, there are two enemies that must be respected: the unsubscribe button and the ad blocker. Although both can be circumvented or ignored, how wise is it to thwart the stated intentions and desires of your visitors?
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Sorry, iPhone X, but Apple's ARKit allows AR sizing without needing depth-sensing.
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Will forcing shoppers to use a different payment mechanism for every retailer be a good thing? Or will it just dampen mobile payment enthusiasm overall?
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Amazon's mobile app-based delivery system sounds convenient. But has anyone thought about the security concerns?
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MasterCard's new effort in virtual reality purchasing takes the worst aspect of in-store shopping and skips the best of online. And they throw in easy unintended purchases.
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It's not every day that a veteran chief information security officer writes a book that blasts the mobile community for torpedoing enterprise security.
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Walmart is setting itself up for trouble with an app that lets employees into your home unattended to put away groceries you ordered.
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One longtime Wall Street financial analyst tracking retail thinks that Amazon may indeed be positioned to disrupt mobile payments just as it has disrupted retail. Our columnist isn't so sure.
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To make sure that companies use Face ID in their apps, Apple simply didn't give them any practical choice.
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IT is seeing a very dangerous collision of two trends: BYOD and mobile apps. IT's job is to protect corporate data — and it's an app-download away from failing.
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The LAN infrastructure may not be with us for much longer, and that's due to cloud and mobile changes. Nonetheless, authentication needs to be changed immediately.
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to bolster e-commerce authentication on desktops and mobile devices.
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Being able to track shoppers as they move from online to in-store has been a marketing goal for years. Google says it has an answer. You just have to trust it blindly.
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What does it mean that users of the Amazon app were less likely to venture into a physical store on the day of Amazon's big sale?
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A new approach to limit how much of your data you need to share is being offered it to companies for free.
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Will Apple embrace facial recognition and iris scans? The mobile industry is preparing for authentication upheaval.
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While other retailers hide their phone number, Zappos encourages its shoppers to call. There are good reasons to remember that a mobile device is still primarily a phone.
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A criminal-case ruling favoring law enforcement would have implications for companies facing civil complaints.
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Mobile-accessed video analytics could be a wonderful retail technology, but only if it's used to attack the right problem.
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It solves a big problem with biometric authentication and opens up some intriguing possibilities.
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One of the first things retail executives learn is that shopper surveys are horrible indicators of what shoppers will do in stores.
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When Walmart found its price-tracking software blocked, it was reminded how fierce a competitor Amazon can be.
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The general lack of such policies is a major security hole.
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The biggest obstacle to Walmart.com being successful is Walmart itself.
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The precautions we urge on employees interfere with their jobs.
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There's a massive difference between retailers using technology to free up associates to do more hands-on work and using that technology to replace those associates.
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The underlying assumptions in almost all of the online vs. in-store arguments are flawed.
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At the very least, it's a reminder that social media embarrassments are forever.
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As policies designed for consumers emerge, the example from AIG is surprisingly comprehensive.
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This magic mirror could be a great sales tool. More likely, though, it will just siphon sales to an online rival.
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Brazilian bank was an easy target after its DNS provider was compromised.
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It's focusing on what in-store can do best: Deliver unique experiences.
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When breaches cost so little, there's not much incentive to avoid them.
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They're an example of big tech companies' failure to take security seriously.
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Who needs thieves? Saks last week made clear that it can breach itself quite efficiently.
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New Wikileaks documents show agents simply refining standard techniques of cybercriminals.
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What happens when a $16 billion, 37-year-old chain wants to tackle CRM for the first time? Whole Foods is about to find out.
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Something as simple as an uncharacteristic turn of phrase can clue people into an email's illegitimacy.
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U.S. retail payment processors seem to act before considering what is likely to happen next.
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You can hide from casual observers, but a motivated person will see through your attempts at anonymization.
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Panera Bread found that mobile payments significantly helped recruit drivers. Why? Fewer robberies.
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For decades, merchants have signed agreements that force them to blindly trust their processors.
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Real privacy laws are needed in the U.S., and now more than ever with the advent of the IoT.
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In fining Mastercard and UniRush, CFPB officials specifically focused on a lack of prelaunch testing, which is typically an IT role.
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If specialized do-it-yourself tools can be rented, easily and efficiently, for two hours, will that start to hurt Lowe's and Home Depot?
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Holiday stats gave Amazon an amazing 46% of all U.S. e-commerce dollars, which is three percentage points more than the prior year.
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Although segmentation is to be applauded, it's not the panacea for the cardholder data problem. Business processes are.
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Judges and juries may think that a company should be better able to eliminate errors in responses with automation.
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A new facial-recognition trial from KFC China and Baidu has more potential to alienate customers than to help them.
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Forcing law firms to pay defendants' legal bills could undermine the business model of patent trolls.
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Mastercard and Visa have announced a three-year delay for EMV rollouts at gas stations. May the gas crimes commence.
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Are retailers really willing to consider disassociating from associates?
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Amazon last week introduced a new approach to in-store technology and strategy, with its Amazon Go experiment. On the plus side, it offers a vision of the possible, once it deals with some key LP hurdles.
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Visa dismisses the issue as a hypothetical attack method — but security researchers tried it and it worked.
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Problems: Mastercard's approach is nothing new, and its usefulness is extremely limited.
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Mediating a battle between Amazon and the FTC, a federal judge offers some well-thought-out limits on in-app purchases for children.
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Walmart's new attempt to use blockchain to help it contact buyers of recalled, dangerous products faces up to a long-neglected reality.
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Macy's this month made its debut appearance within Alibaba's Singles' Day in China. Well, sort of. Its appearance was only virtual.
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There is no reason for Citi to aggravate a big chunk of the merchant community.
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Customer-centric retail is not a buzzphrase. It's the only path to survival.
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When revenue dropped, the CEO blamed a new POS system. That's bad for the company's IT department, but could be good for yours.
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If opt-in agreements can be hidden within T&C documents, consumers will have little choice than to sign away their privacy rights.
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The latest WikiLeaks revelations included a reminder that there are revealing things that just can't be encrypted.
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A long-standing complaint about NFC phone payments has been, "What happens when the phone battery dies?" Vodafone has come up with a way around that — albeit with a lot of caveats.
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Amazon quietly updated its app last week and confessed that its iOS shopping cart would freeze when a shopper tries to switch between apps.
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The threats posed by IoT devices are real and have to be addressed with structural changes.
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Target's voice-recognition trial misunderstands the allure of Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, and also how shoppers think and communicate.
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For years, retail has clumsily struggled with various merged channel strategies. No changes in commission structure or bonus requirements have proved effective.
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When you most need to be able to say that you are PCI-compliant is when it's taken away.
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Your efforts at raising security awareness could be making users feel that it's pointless to try to protect themselves.
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In retail, we have seen merged channel, omnichannel and multi-channel, but here's an interesting twist: We are now seeing concrete marketing evidence from dual-screening, one courtesy of a new eBay U.K. report. Dual-screening is where a shopper watches television while also interacting with a mobile device.
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The combination of seasonal help and tech trials -- when combined with a lack of training -- is a holiday recipe for disaster.
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Envision opening the Walmart app and summoning a cart to wherever you're standing and having it drive right to you.
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Chase has quietly stopped asking for passwords for sensitive transfers on its mobile app, concluding that a fingerprint-scan is quite sufficient.
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If demanding receipts is too much bother for fraudsters, so much the better.
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EMV deployment struggles are keeping in-store fraud rates high while pushing online fraud much higher. Worst of both worlds for the moment.
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The developer mindset is light-years from how consumers actually interact with apps.
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Amazon's rationale — there are people who want to work fewer hours at a price of lower pay — is old-fashioned.
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During an August investors call, Home Depot CEO Craig Menear let loose a stunning stat: 90% of all online returns are processed in-store.
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The magic of retail centers is on knowing and understanding shoppers better than they know themselves, and Amazon is brilliant at it.
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Few retailers have as complicated and painful payment systems as do drugstores. CVS is struggling to do the best it can.
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Consider Jack in the Box, which a year ago shut down all of its customer call centers, pushing customer service online.
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When Walmart said that it was buying Jet.com for $3 billion, it was widely interpreted as it getting serious about competing with Amazon. That's not what is happening.
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New reports last week highlighted some novel ways for information to get into the wrong hands.
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At a Fortune 500 company, money — and the number of projects under your command — is power. Target's CIO has a very different view.
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Websites use the baseball rule to thwart authentication thieves: Three strikes and you're out. PayPal argues that there's a better way, one that customizes the rules to the user.
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With CRM, merchants try to understand shoppers as much as possible. In today's social-media-oriented world, that goes far beyond a list of products purchased and website pages visited.
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One small step for man, one giant leap for flying Slurpees.
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A centralized approach that governs how apps interact and what they are allowed to do is essential.
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Visa has new stats showing that nearly three-quarters of U.S. merchants still can't handle chip cards.
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The change from 'MasterCard' to 'Mastercard' is part of a play for a role in a digital marketplace.
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Envision using this against a spammer, someone whose comments you don't like or a bargain-hunter that is cutting into your margins.
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Starbucks software rolled out a price increase weeks before it was supposed to.
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Seeing all your Google activity in one place can be eye-opening, and having the ability to delete any of it carries some far-reaching implications.
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Consumers love sales, and yet the concept itself is oddly unclear.
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Walmart Pay is about to go national, but why didn't it embrace NFC payments?
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In-store can still work well, but experience must reign supreme.
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A senate bill raises frightening questions. Will retailers and manufacturers use QR codes to hide need-to-know consumer information, by being vague about what the code will deliver?
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Customized offers are great, but the line between perfect match and creepy is nuanced.
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Shoppers won't have to enter their credit card details — but the number of times it will be truly useful is small.
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Home Depot's lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard tackled the security problems of the EMV rollout. But what the retailer conveniently forgot to mention is far more germane.
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Better analytics and mobile crowdsourcing could deliver better pricing.
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After 12 years of operation, shouldn't NRF be able to point to better and more concrete examples?
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The move is an attack against bogus reviews, but there's a lot more going on here.
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Experimentation is great, but a retailer needs to understand how it is perceived. On that point, Target failed.
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What is hard to understand is why LinkedIn didn't feel the need to force password changes until four years after the breach.
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The chain may be radically rethinking how business can be done.
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Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are the latest retailers to see the Apple Pay experience bedeviled by EMV rules.
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A grim reminder of how interconnected the payments world is these days.
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If all its stores consolidated their technology and resources, a mall could deliver a shopping experience that even Amazon couldn't match.
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In a sense, this is the ultimate in transparency, giving shoppers who want to pay for fresher produce that choice.
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Price protection programs depend on shoppers not bothering to check after the purchase is done. This app changes all of that.
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Could virtual assistants soon be calling retail stores directly and handling complicated discussions? If so, the implications are tremendous.
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The cool part here is Kohl's integration, which makes it just about effortless for the shopper. Or does it?
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The decision from a case involving a company's method of presenting its terms and conditions is otherwise fairly meaningless.
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Far too often, the levels above CIOs and CISOs don't understand PCI and find the ever-increasing cost of security frustrating.
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When it comes to apparel, footwear has generated some of the most powerful sites, but a personal component to shoe shopping transcends what is possible online.
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Either wall off your payment data so that no one beyond a small set authorized persons can get access, regardless of network privilege, or force everyone to play by PCI rules. Here's the kicker: They already should have been playing by PCI rules.
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When Visa introduced its Quick Chip for EMV on Tuesday, it placed retailers in an awkward — but interesting — position.
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The CEO publicly said that he wanted to allow texting and other mobile interactions during films. That's how powerful the idea of mobile has become.
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Microsoft doesn't want government seizures of its data, done in secrecy, to jeopardize the trust its customers must hold toward it. Retailers have the same problem.
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Restrictions are abhorrent and a draft bill in the Senate is overly broad and ambiguous. But if Congress insists on restrictions, let's add some critical limits.
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There are many reasons not to pay ransom to regain access to your data. Let's opt for the selfish one.
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It seems a shame to waste the ability to show shoppers any imagery or video you want on commercials.
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This is an impressive piece of engineering. By combining RFID, NFC and QR, Moncler is trying to deliver the best of all approaches.
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This robot saunters to your home at 12 mph and insists that you leave your house to meet it on the sidewalk to get your cold pizza. Domino's stresses that you can't pay it a tip, but there was never much risk of that.
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If your stores look and function as they did 10 years ago, you need to rethink design.
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McDonald's CRM program may just prove to be a great case study for when a CRM program costs more than it helps.
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With all of the effort by retailers to lure shoppers into their stores, one would think that granting those customers an easy and painless exit would be a priority. One would be wrong.
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Grabbing a young shopper on mobile or social today goes far beyond what it says. Engagement today is meant quite literally.
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The latest testing reveals some non-intuitive computer profile details for spotting the bad guys.
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The thieves will find other tactics and the shoppers will shop elsewhere. Congrats, retailers: You'll have succeeded in becoming less popular for all.
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Even for merchants — who typically express bitter resentment about the paperwork-intensive and labor-expensive PCI process — it's an uncomfortable area to probe.
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It's all about giving customers a reason to visit the store.
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As enterprises rely ever more deeply on mobile devices for email, CIOs beware. A bug in iOS is periodically hiding email messages, in a way that makes the messages appear to have been deleted.
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As the encryption argument takes center stage in the ongoing Apple vs. the U.S. Government squabbles, a very important—and potentially destructive—change is taking place in security strategy.
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A custom-built pizza delivery car is the chain's latest masterly stroke at distracting from the core product.
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Has the chain that best understands customer service figured out merged channel and enterprise IT, too?
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Even as the chain tries its hardest to sound channel-agnostic, it somehow always comes back to getting shoppers into its physical stores.
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Without obfuscation, Android app encryption security doesn't help much. That's a lesson Match.com learned, but it took long enough.
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Under the best of circumstances, figuring out e-commerce ROI is challenging. The e-commerce chief at RainbowShops.com found that PayPal support adds a lot more complexity.
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A huge planned global supply chain move by Amazon could disrupt product access, sharply lower Amazon's costs and accelerate product delivery to shoppers.
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Retailers have overwhelmingly avoided any attempts to dabble with voice recognition, but that is a huge error.
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New Accenture research says retailers are not delivering for their customers. It's the right conclusion, but for the wrong reasons.
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The CIOs, IT Directors and CISOs for large companies have enough to worry about without having to take on the mountains of security holes infesting small- and medium-sized businesses around the globe. But a new report shows a direct connection between SMB security flaws and those of their Fortune 1000 neighbors.
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The apparel and accessory chain gets creative with its RFID magic mirror trial-and leverages special dressing room paint to block both RF and mobile signals.
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If you want to understand how these companies differ, study their drone filings.
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Security and privacy debates are highly nuanced, allowing for much interpretation, balancing acts and differences of opinion. For that reason, I try and be tolerant of a wide range of views on the subject. Every so often, though, some executive says something so divorced from logic and reality that silence is not an option. Enter AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and his attack on Apple's encryption efforts.
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Laser measurements are far more advanced than the shoe industry. But it will give Nordstrom's shoppers a reason to believe the customer service magic.
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Physical stores need to be re-envisioned to let the feel, smell and sounds of products sell themselves. It's a shame that retailers won't ever do that.
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Using social to create the illusion of intimacy is good, but it's never forgetting the brand that is the magic.
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Does Amazon really want to get into the loan business? That's the part of shopping that customers hate.
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Visa's Girl Scouts program is about many things, not the least of which is converting one of the last bastions of cash sales.
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It's self-defeating to try to protect data by treating it all as if it's equally sensitive.
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It says something really bad that a company can make a living interpreting retail price-match rules.
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Recruit a bunch of anarchists and — surprise, surprise — you get anarchy.
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A new Deloitte survey suggests that younger consumers are more aware of mobile security and data risks than any other segment. What do they know — or not know?
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Target has a vision of a new kind of physical store to compete with online rivals, one that attempts to sidestep the drudgery of shopping by wiping out the need for customers to lug around their purchases through the store's aisles.
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A neglected trial is expensive in ways far beyond out-of-pocket costs.
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Giving shoppers an easy way to summon an associate is bad news if you don't have associates to respond quickly.
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A breach that doesn't result in anyone compromising any data is something like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest with no one around. Is it truly a data breach?
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Domino's has proved itself adept at mastering sales via online, mobile and social media.
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Square is one of the few companies truly trying to change retail payments. This may be the only chance to buy in.
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Wall Street has no collective memory. Consider Amazon's infrastructure investments. Wall Street is drooling now, but not so long ago it thought they were a terrible idea.
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The hacking group's activities have always seemed dubious, but in this case, success will be quite welcome.
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Was this project really just an effort to flag shoppers who had previously been suspected of shoplifting?
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No one in retail is more manipulative about free offers than Amazon — or more successful at it.
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With a video connection to any store in the chain, foreign-born customers could deal with sales associates who speak their language.
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An idea aimed at consumers just might work for enterprises that want to safeguard communications too.
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When you watch Walmart, as I have done for years, you start to wonder where it wants to go with its business model, and whether it has any chance of ever getting there.
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It's a rare lawsuit that achieves good. Amazon's might just end up doing that.
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Apparently, an evil programmer elf came up with a clever way to bypass supervisors checking pages before they went live.
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The chain says adding a fee to click-and-collect didn't hurt sales. First, that's not at all clear. Second, anti-shopper moves never ever work in the long term. Never.
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It's bad enough when the FBI announces to the world that you're not secure enough. It's even worse when it then reluctantly takes it back.
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The system is counterintuitive, and its usefulness is yet to be demonstrated.
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Item-level RFID, geolocation, cross-retailer CRM and true associate integration are the initial elements.
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Deliberately making shoppers jump through hurdles to get "better" pricing is arguably retail's most self-defeating idea ever.
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FireEye, like all companies, wants to protect its intellectual property. But it needs to realize that security companies aren't perceived like other companies.
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In security circles, hype and marketing — and the security complacency they encourage — can be more dangerous than a well-funded cyberthief.
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There's no doubt that this robot will prove to be an attention-generating novelty in Manhattan, but will it ultimately prove counterproductive for Best Buy?
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Increasing digital sales doesn't mean you need fewer stores. Paradoxically, it can mean you need a lot more of them.
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Instead of saying that unplanned manual efforts across more than 8,000 stores caused some transactions to fall through the cracks, Walgreens prefers to say it has no idea whether all transactions went through or not.
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When a user-experience company recently tested mobile apps from pharmacy chain Rite Aid and restaurant chain Applebee's, both apps greatly frustrated focus-group users. Is mobile development being ignored?
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Consumers love the idea of being healthy far more than they love doing what it takes to be healthy. For Walgreens, that's a win-win.
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To a greater extent than others, Target is trying to be creative about finding approaches that resonate.
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All companies need to pay more attention to the experience that ordinary users have when they try to install new products and upgrades.
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This global Faustian bargain assumes that this deal will last forever. Didn't Borders/Amazon teach us anything?
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Is easy design too easy? More importantly, is it costing e-commerce sites serious dollars?
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The reversals by Gap, Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch move should cause IT to re-evaluate quite a few decisions.
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Employers misjudge how potential insider cyberattackers will judge the risks and payoffs from their crimes.
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Brick-and-mortar retailers can't beat Amazon at its game. Instead, they must force Amazon to play theirs.
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It's not about bringing customers into the mall. It's about giving them reasons to come all the time — and not wanting to leave.
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Zero oversight is bad, especially given that there's almost no way of getting the money back.
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Printed coupons and mobile devices are as far apart as Bitcoins and silver dollars. One company has been specializing in bridging the gap.
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A breakthrough in A.I. has been reported that suddenly makes all of those apocalyptic predictions about killer robots seem less crazy.
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If we worry about every possible privacy invasion, we will end up not paying enough attention to the ones that really need to be addressed.
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Counting people inside the store is a service that could be very powerful — if done with shoppers and merchants in mind.
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As any Walmart supplier knows, there's no such thing as an innocuous memo from Bentonville.
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Amazon tries to enlist NASA in effort to control the skies.
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Two court rulings basically maintain that we can't expect privacy on the phone or on social media. George Orwell would be proud of the judges.
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Perhaps a journey of 1,000 SKUs starts with a single parking break?
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Retailers really want shoppers to use self-checkout, but many underestimate the psychological deterrents they put in place.
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They were just excuses for the closing of the chain's flagship toy store.
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If our goal in sentencing is to reduce such crimes, you have to ask how sending kids to prison accomplishes that.
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Would-be copiers have to understand that Apple's circumstances actually fit the word 'unique'.
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A single experience shouldn't condemn the tactic, but shoppers use one-time experiences all the time in deciding what shops and services to use in the future.
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The Stores Magazine editors want us to believe it was all about IT.
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Reports have some of Donald Trump's hotels being hit by a payment card-seeking cyberattack. This could lead to a very high-profile exploration of how little a company can do to prevent being breached.
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The sad truth is that "That's not what I meant" isn't a defense that can save anyone's job.
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An app that sets up a profile of you for all the e-tailers you visit could be convenient, but it carries some troubling privacy implications.
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As companies use more domain names, this problem will crop up more frequently.
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Lost amid all of the mega-drugstore talk sparked by this acquisition are some extremely likely data security and privacy problems and HIPAA horrors.
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USPS executives see it as salvation for the service, but can anything make the post office relevant again?
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Retail research house IHL in June estimated an industrywide loss of $1.1 trillion. But IHL is not limiting itself to traditional metrics.
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As Tesco clothing shoppers rifle through the chain's apparel assortment, they'll be sharing the aisles with six-foot-tall RFID robots, rolling up and down, scanning clothing tags for inventory.
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The next step in mobile magic starts with cross-comparing all of the data already collected.
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One of the company's arguments: Yahoo Mail customers should notify anyone who emails them that any email they send to the customer could be scanned by Yahoo – presumably including the original email already sent before the customer could warn the sender. And that argument didn't work?
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Amazon is trying to better local stores at their own game, but it looks like what Amazon gains in ideas is being lost in deployment.
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The FTC could have made a statement about what limits and notifications need to be in place. Instead, it focused on a narrow phrasing issue, while buying into industry marketing arguments that are truly misleading and dangerous.
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Retailers, don't take credit for a technology that's been around for a while.
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Ordering a pizza via Twitter isn't faster or more convenient than submitting the same entry through the company's mobile app. But it does have one huge advantage – enjoyed almost entirely by Domino's.
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To move from discount-pitching to sale-closing, a few hurdles have to be cleared.
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Companies make excuses for not addressing security holes that seem unlikely to be exploited. The problem is that they often do get exploited. Just ask United.
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With the Internet of Things, we're going to be needing a lot more IP addresses. That's exactly what IPv6 has in mind.
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Retailers need to think about how the ways they use new technology could damage carefully crafted brands.
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It's becoming increasingly clear that what all mobile wallets have lacked so far is a good reason to use them.
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An early Internet of Things entrant demonstrates some of the problems the IoT will bring.
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How Amazon is using cloud dollars to freak out every retailer in the country.
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How a company handles people telling it about its own security holes says an awful lot about how that company views itself.
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There's a nuanced distinction between having a very popular sale and arranging for far too little merchandise. And between crashing and having a slow site. Target needs to learn those distinctions.
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Amazon envisions a retail floor with no checkout, run by an array of cameras and scales that will identify shoppers and the products they grab.
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We all rely on email too much to share and archive sensitive information, and we're all at risk.
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Between iPhone's fingerprints and a kiosk's face check, biometrics may be getting its day.
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We tested the app and couldn't get very far before it glitched — repeatedly.
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One startup is trying a new approach. Will other new ideas follow?
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The U.S. government wants access to an alleged drug dealer's emails, but Microsoft says, sorry, they're in Ireland and out of bounds. This is what happens when we apply non-digital rules to digital situations.
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One thing she should know is that armed guards aren't really equipped to stop a data breach.
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The death of Leonard Nimoy brings to mind how far-reaching the Star Trek legacy has been.
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If you only let the investigators look at your policies and not at what your employees actually do, you're telling us a lot more about your real privacy views than you realize. And it's not pretty.
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The company is being coy about what it can do with your enterprise's email if you sign up for its cloud-based service.
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Bill proposed by National Retail Federation wouldn't shut them down, and it might simply legitimize them.
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This Christmas, Amazon made a delivery when not a creature should have been stirring. That could herald great changes on the retail landscape.
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The fast food giant's drive-through Apple Pay implementation is kludgy and uncomfortable for both the customer and the employee. Is anyone testing this stuff?
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When retailers use IT analytics to get close to their customers, they need to do it the right way.
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The once-dominant mobile-email player's latest pitch is irrelevant for today's smartphone buyers. Can the company's BYOD pitch save the day?
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A judge's ruling that a person can be forced to open his phone with his fingerprint ignores the fact that the fingerprint scan is just a substitute PIN, which can't be required by law enforcement.
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As courts continue to rule on what is and is not acceptable when it comes to tracking, a lot of what we do with our smartphones could become illegal.
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Google patted itself on the back for being responsive to a request to take down nude photos of celebrities. But it should have stressed that all such requests are subject to intensive due diligence.
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The Apple Pay approach to mobile payment turns the security conundrum upside down by keeping data out of thief-magnet servers.
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If lack of data visibility is crippling Apple, what chance do mere IT mortals have?
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No marketer wants to leave a potential market untapped, and Google hates to disappoint marketers. That could explain why Google is going to start offering Gmail, YouTube and other accounts to kids younger than 13.
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Same-day delivery is a boon for the online leader, but it will only help doom B&N.
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New York's plan to turn pay phones into free Wi-Fi stations could be a template for other cities, and bad news for IT departments trying to protect corporate data and intellectual property.
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Goldman Sachs is taking Google to court to force the cloud vendor to delete an email accidentally sent to a Gmail user. The consequences of a ruling for Goldman would be devastating.
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Unanimous decision won't shut down patent trolls, but it will curb worst abuses.
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Fake accounts that troll for followers' contact info just might be a problem. Meet 'Alex Van Pelter.' Oh, and LinkedIn is great, except when it's annoying.
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As Google gears up for the Internet of Things, its vision seems a bit off. Thermostats as billboards?
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The UN wants to talk about killer robots as 'conventional weapons.' Someone needs to learn the IT facts of life: If something can go wrong, it will.
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The White House's big report on big-data privacy has several shortcomings.
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FTC takes it to task for misleading privacy policy, other transgressions. You should take another look at your company's privacy policy.
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Marketers will want to use tools like Snapchat's Here feature to bend consumers to their will. IT has to inject rationality into the resulting discussions.
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If our checks and balances are so fragile that a typo can obliterate all meaningful security, we have some fundamental things to fix.
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Employees can unintentionally share more than their employers want anyone to know.
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The alternatives to an independent list like Full Disclosure can't match it for stopping new cyberattack tactics.
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Walgreens also joins the list, as it becomes increasingly obvious that companies aren't doing enough security testing.
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The coffee purveyor has indicated it wants to move in that direction. But so do other companies, and they all have some hurdles to overcome.
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It offers slightly greater payment convenience, but at what cost?
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Even if a company were willing to expunge personal data that it had been authorized to collect, the realities of IT systems mean it probably could never completely do that.
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A new call for transparency about what data mobile apps are retaining sounds fine and noble, but too many companies don't even know what their apps know about consumers.
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Match.com and eHarmony also among those now saying, 'We didn't know our mobile apps did that'.
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You might see security and privacy pitfalls, but the advantages of the Internet of Things mean there's no stopping it. Your smart fridge is going to miss you when you're working every night.
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Tech overreach now has its mascot: the True Love Tester bra. How do companies green-light such hare-brained product ideas?
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Starbucks released a mobile app that stored passwords in clear text. There's a good chance that a lot of other companies just don't know whether they could find themselves in the same situation.
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Google Glass is just the latest technological advance to elicit fear and dread in some quarters, including law enforcement.
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Why would anyone be comfortable with social networking sites sending out messages in their name?
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The company is dancing around the question of what it knew and when it knew it, but the security problem was not a revelation for it this week.
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In a case of convenience for users trumping security, Starbucks has been storing the passwords for its mobile-payment app, along with geolocation data, in clear text.
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The coffee chain was smart enough to push mobile by not initially pushing mobile. It's an approach that can work for your business too, internally and externally.
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If your company doesn't yet have a mobile-specific privacy policy, it's time to get to work.
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Companies have to fully confront the privacy issues they face and rethink their policies from the bottom up.
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The way Target deployed triple DES encryption for debit card PINs makes its statement about the unlikelihood that they were in danger much more believable.
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Issuing deceptive statements is no way to win back customers' trust. That's a lesson for anyone who might find itself in Target's position someday.
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A sale, right before Christmas? What an extraordinary step for a retailer to take! And that hefty 10% off is available to everyone. Target's millions of breach victims must be feeling very special.
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Instagram is going to let you send messages and images to small subsets of your friends and family. It's a clever way to get more of your data into the hands of marketers.
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