Your data may be discounted: This week’s product news

Product Management News - December 17, 2024

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Our content series gives you the lowdown on what’s been happening in the world of product this week and what it could mean for product professionals. This week, we're looking at new data rules, Threads, and more news from OpenAI. 

Your data may not be for sale as widely as it was before. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to rein in the sale of Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information. In the wake of high-profile hacks affecting hundreds of millions of Americans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is proposing a rule limiting data brokers’ ability to sell Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information. Under the proposed rule, data brokers that sell information about consumers’ income, credit history, credit score, or debt payments would be considered consumer reporting agencies. As such, they’d be required to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), a law limiting how these agencies can obtain and use the information provided in consumer reports.

These aren’t the posts you’re looking for. Threads is rolling out a search update globally over the next few weeks that will let users filter searches to a specific profile and within date ranges. The existing search built into Threads has been a basic keyword search to find trending topics, posts, or accounts, with “Top” and “Recent” sorting options. You’ll have the option to look for posts after a specific date, before a date, or from a specific profile. These search updates are an attempt by Threads to reach parity with X and Bluesky and a recognition that people use social networks for more than just doom scrolling. Doom searching, perhaps?

OpenAI wishes you happy holidays. Open AI plans to kick off a “shipmas” period of new features, products, and demos for 12 days, starting on December 5th. The announcements include a text-to-video AI tool, Sora, and a new reasoning model.

Gemini has continued its pursuit of becoming the best AI tool, with Google introducing Gemini 2.0. It has promised advances in multimodality—like native image and audio output—and provides a native tool that aims to enable users to build new AI agents. Another noticeable feature update from Gemini is Deep Research, which uses advanced reasoning and long context capabilities to act as a research assistant.

This weekly briefing offers a product-specific lowdown of what is happening worldwide and what it means for product teams. Like what you see? Let us know in the comments below, or email us at editor@mindtheproduct.com