Today’s Cache | Cisco lays off thousands; Google offers to sell part of its advertising business; LinkedIn trains AI models on user data

FILE PHOTO: U.S. software company Cisco has laid off thousands more employees in a second round of job cuts this year. | Photo credit: Reuters

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Cisco lays off thousands of people

American software company Cisco lays off thousands more employees in second wave job cuts this year. In August, the company announced it would reduce its workforce by 7%, or 5,600 employees. This followed the layoff of 4,000 employees earlier in February.

Despite strong results in the previous quarter, the company said the layoffs were aimed at restructuring and investing in key growth opportunities and streamlining the business. It plans to merge its security, networking, and collaboration segments into a single unit. Cisco was also looking to capitalize on the growing reach of AI technologies and had earmarked funds for that purpose. The company has yet to confirm which departments will be affected by the layoffs, but a report said the threat intelligence and security research unit, Talos Security, would be affected.

Google has offered to sell part of its advertising business

Google’s parent company Alphabet has offered to sell its advertising marketplace AdX The EU rejected the proposal as insufficient, according to sources. The company’s thriving advertising business has been put under the spotlight after a complaint from the European Publishers Council.

The EU has accused Google of favoring its own ad services, the fourth complaint against the company. Google’s offer is unprecedented as it also faces a U.S. antitrust lawsuit that wants the company to sell its Ad Manager product, which includes AdX and the company’s publisher ad server, DFP. Sources told Reuters the EU could instead order Google to stop alleged anticompetitive practices in the near future instead of a divestiture. The majority of Google’s revenue (77%) comes from advertising across Gmail, Google Play, Search, Google Maps, YouTube, AdMob, AdSense and Google Ad Manager.

LinkedIn trained AI models on user data

Users on the professional networking platform LinkedIn discovered that its data was being used To train AI models without consent. An option in settings that allowed individuals’ personal data and content to be trained for AI models was enabled by default, users in the US and India said. Users have since been advised to manually disable the option if they want to opt out of the platform using their content.

After the news broke, LinkedIn updated its terms of service. However, ideally, users should have been informed well before it started collecting data. Most respondents expressed concerns about privacy and plagiarism after the discovery. Strict privacy laws in the EU have yet to take action against the platform. Meanwhile, tech giant Microsoft, which acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, is also facing lawsuits over its alleged use of people’s data for AI training.