Welcome to the latest edition of the World of DaaS Roundup.
This issue's stories share a question: can you trust the data underneath? IDMap.ai's Sabira Arefin argues AI agents are only as good as the location data beneath them. The Forecasting Company's models now beat much bigger rivals from Google and Amazon. Massive published a live abuse tracker for its proxy network. Meta paused its news-scraping rules, and a Brazilian court blocked it from training on local news. The FTC wants to know exactly how companies use personal data to set your price.
We added a quick poll this issue, and we'd love your answer.
Let's get into it.
News & Reads
MEMBER SPOTLIGHTS
Sabira Arefin, CEO of IDMap.ai - In Forbes: AI agents acting in the physical world are only as good as the location data underneath them ↗
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Geoffrey Négiar, Co-Founder of The Forecasting Company - How research at UC Berkeley's ICSI became t0, forecasting models that beat much larger rivals from Google and Amazon on public benchmarks ↗
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Jason Grad, CEO of Massive - Massive's proxy network passed 100 billion web requests a month, and it published a live abuse tracker to prove it plays by the rules ↗
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Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM - ATTOM's AI-powered Rental AVM now covers nearly 100 million US homes, most of them with no rental history to learn from ↗
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Sara Fagen, CEO of Tunnl - New Tunnl survey: 63% of Americans won't accept a fully automated AI decision on a loan or claim without a human appeal ↗
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Brent Buchanan, CEO of Cygnal - Before Tuesday's midterms, Cygnal's private polling argued the expected "Blue Wave" understated how many persuadable voters were still in play ↗
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INDUSTRY NEWS
Your price has a spreadsheet - The FTC orders Walmart, Delta, DoorDash, and others to disclose how they use personal data to set prices and pay ↗
The patchwork keeps growing - Four more states pass comprehensive privacy laws, bringing the total to 24 ↗
Meta backs off - Meta pauses rules that critics say could let it scrape news sites for AI training ↗
Brazil says no - A São Paulo court blocks Meta from training AI on Brazilian news content, with a reported $233K-a-day fine ↗
Sue or sign - The same publishers are suing some AI companies and licensing to others ↗
WORLD OF DAAS AT DATA OKTOBERFEST
Last Wednesday, our friends at Monda and Datarade hosted Data Oktoberfest in New York, and World of DaaS was proud to be a sponsor. Data buyers from enterprises, hedge funds, and AI labs joined data providers and industry leaders for beer, pretzels, and conversation. Thank you to everyone who came out, and to Monda and Datarade for bringing the industry together.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Data Science Summit 2026, Thursday-Friday, November 26-27, hybrid (online and PGE Narodowy, Warsaw). Central and Eastern Europe's largest data and AI conference, with a dedicated AI Agents track.
An Unexpected Data Read For Today.
Tuesday's ballots carried a message for the AI buildout. Voters in multiple states approved data center moratoriums and backed candidates who want to slow things down, even in Texas, the center of the current boom.
The affordability politics of AI infrastructure are starting to outweigh its economic promise. The data economy runs on compute, and compute now has to win at the ballot box.
And forecasters had their own reckoning: prediction markets had favored the losing candidate at 70% in South Carolina's Senate race.
Where Data Meets Art
What if the sky above you were drawn from live data?
Funny Weather, by artist Theo Triantafyllidis, is a live generative installation on the Media Wall at Aviva Studios in Manchester. It pulls real-time atmospheric data and local bird sightings into an ever-changing simulated sky. It opens November 11 and runs through December 6.
More data and art to check out: MAM, a new museum of digital art in Rome, opened November 2. It is built on more than two decades of net art and VJ-culture archives, with a mission to preserve internet-era art before it disappears from the web.
Quick Poll
One click, and we'll share what we hear in a future issue.
What's the biggest thing standing between your data and AI buyers trusting it?
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The World of DaaS Team
