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Industry executives gathering this week at IAA Mobility, a massive auto show in Munich, found themselves the subjects of some unwelcome attention: In addition to activists gluing themselves to the roads and blocking traffic with bicycles to protest the sector’s contribution to climate change, the Mozilla Foundation published a damning report about automakers’ collection and handling of personal data, an example of how corporates are increasingly being subject to unrelenting scrutiny by both consumers and industry watchdogs to ensure they live up to their promises.

“All 25 car brands we researched earned our ‘Privacy Not Included’ warning label -- making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed,” says the Mozilla Foundation September 6 report, which accuses car brands of “collecting more personal data than necessary and using that information for a reason other than to operate consumers’ vehicles and manage their relationship with them.” Based on the car companies’ track records the Mozilla Foundation says it doesn’t trust the car companies to keep car owner’s data safe. And, the report says, “we don’t think a lot of the ways that your information is being shared or sold benefits drivers or anyone besides the businesses who exist to make money off of your data.”

The report’s findings led Mozilla Foundation to launch a global petition to “tell car companies to stop their huge data collection programs.”
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

Tech entrepreneurs, policy makers, NGOs, and executives at corporates such as BMW, BASF, Mastercard and adidas, gathered in Munich this week for back-to-back conferences that focused on circularity and artificial intelligence.

Jennifer L. Schenker, The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief, moderated panels at both DLD Circular and DLD AI She is pictured here moderating the “AI In Use: Industry Perspectives” panel)

Paying subscribers can read on to get the key takeaways from the conferences. The article will be posted this weekend on The Innovator's website.

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Even if advances in technology mean that automated translations are perfect 90% of the time, enterprises can't afford mistakes that can have serious consequences, so they are still sending every single AI-generated segment to a professional human translator for review at a cost about $1 per sentence, a price point that for big corporates can add up to millions or tens of millions of euros a year. ModelFront's machine learning technology aims to predict which machine translations are correct and can be used as is, skipping unnecessary, costly human post-editing by enabling a hybrid translation workflow that combines human quality and machine speed.
“Our technology knows when to stop and let a human take over,” says Adam Bittlingmayer, CEO of the Silicon Valley-based company and a speaker at DLD AI in Munich Sept. 7.

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Ai research lab OpenAI's projected revenue over the next 12 months from the sale of artificial intelligence software and the computing capacity that powers it, according to The Information, a Silicon Valley publication. That’s far ahead of revenue projections the company previously shared with its shareholders, a person with direct knowledge of the situation told The Innofmation..

The billion-dollar revenue figure implies that the Microsoft-backed company, which was valued on paper at $27 billion when investors bought stock from existing shareholders earlier this year, is generating more than $80 million in revenue per month. OpenAI generated just $28 million in revenue last year before it started charging for its groundbreaking chatbot, ChatGPT.