The Washington Technology Industry Association kicked off the third annual Seattle AI Week on Monday with a reminder that AI affects everyone, from engineers and artists to “someone who learned about ChatGPT today,” as WTIA’s Nick Ellingson put it.
“All of us should be a part of that conversation,” he added.
A few people in the audience took that statement literally.
Members of Troublemakers, a Seattle climate activism group, interrupted the week’s opening panel on AI and economic growth several times before they were led out by security. Outside on Elliott Bay, others floated in kayaks with a banner: “Power for People, Not for Tech.”
“These are not your constituents — we are,” one protester told Beau Perschbacher, Gov. Bob Ferguson’s senior policy advisor, as he addressed the large crowd of tech and startup leaders at Seattle’s AI House. Perschbacher was on a panel with Joe Nguyen of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Mattie Zazueta of OpenAI, the event’s presenting sponsor.
The group’s main message, according to members who spoke with GeekWire: the rush to build data centers and roll out AI is putting the state’s communities, jobs and environment at risk, and Washington should be investing in green jobs and clean energy instead.
The protest comes amid a broader backlash against data centers in Washington state and across the country. The Seattle City Council voted unanimously in June to pause new large data centers in the city for a year, and Washington AI Resistance organized at least 19 protests around the state this month calling for a statewide moratorium.
The event also came the same day Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, as it spends tens of billions of dollars on data centers and AI infrastructure.
The backlash contrasts with a push from the business and tech community for Washington state and the Seattle region to do more to stay competitive in the AI era.
“Washington helped build the technology economy of the last generation. We have an extraordinary opportunity to lead the AI economy of the next,” said former Gov. Chris Gregoire, now CEO of the business group Challenge Seattle, in her opening remarks at the AI Week event.
Gregoire cited efforts to put AI to work on the region’s own problems, including an AI permitting pilot in Everett that she said could cut the median wait for an accessory dwelling unit permit from 252 days to 90. She highlighted the AI-driven protein design work of Nobel laureate David Baker of the University of Washington, with applications in areas including the environment, agriculture and health care.
She also warned that Washington is close to the bottom for its business climate, even though it ranks second in North America for tech talent, as other states court its companies and jobs.
On the panel, Perschbacher said Ferguson’s administration has been focused on data centers since taking office, setting up a work group early last year to study their impact. The group looked for a Washington community that had been harmed by a data center and couldn’t find one, he said.
He added that the state won’t permit data centers to run diesel generators around the clock, and that their water use turned out to be “not out of line with a typical industrial user.”
Electricity is a different story. Data centers “use a really significant amount of electricity,” he said, and with demand also rising from EVs and heat pumps, getting enough power “is a major challenge.”
Perschbacher addressed the protesters directly, saying Washington has some of the strictest environmental laws in the country and that the state’s data center work group reinforced those rules rather than weakening them. Bills on ratepayer protections and transparency for data centers are likely to come back in the next legislative session, he said.
The issue also came up in the event’s second panel, on AI policy. State Sen. Marko Liias, who sponsored a bill this year on high-risk uses of AI, said data centers that want to locate in Washington need to meet “stringent expectations,” including adding clean energy to the grid, recycling water and dropping nondisclosure agreements that keep communities in the dark. Washington’s goal “has never been to be the cheapest or easiest place,” he said.
“When energy becomes scarce, I do think we need to be clear that our communities deserve access to that energy before the data centers do,” Liias said.
Joe Braidwood, founder of AI governance startup Glacis, which works out of AI House, said on the same panel that it was the first event he’d attended there with a public protest. “I think that’s actually kind of promising that people care enough to want to come together and talk and disagree and figure this out,” he said.
Zazueta, OpenAI’s global head of community programs, said in the opening panel that the industry needs to do a better job showing people the benefits of AI. Many people “read about these scary headlines,” she said, but don’t see how the technology applies to their daily lives.
OpenAI runs AI literacy workshops and trains libraries and community groups to lead their own, she said. The company opened an expanded office in Bellevue in March, its largest engineering center outside San Francisco.
Speaking with GeekWire outside the event on Monday afternoon, one of the protesters who had interrupted the panel singled out that remark. She said it dismissed public concerns about AI as the product of bad headlines, and she objected to the idea of using community groups to win people over to the benefits of artificial intelligence.
“They want to infiltrate our communities,” she said.
The opening panel with Zazueta, Perschbacher and Nguyen was titled “The Abundance State: Washington’s Chance to Lead the AI Future.” The protester objected to that framing, saying the panelists’ idea of abundance came down to easing permits for data centers.
It wasn’t the first time the group has protested the tech industry’s energy use. In 2024, it blocked entrances at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters to protest the company’s plans to power data centers in Oregon with natural gas.
Inside the event on Monday, as the interruptions continued, Nguyen, a former state senator who now leads the Seattle chamber, had responded to the protesters directly. “If you want to have your own event, have your own event,” he told them.
After they were led out, Nguyen said he agreed with the protesters, calling their passion “very warranted.” Those concerns are one reason Washington created some of the most stringent energy policies in the country, he said, adding that everyone would be better off if data centers elsewhere were held to the same standards.
“I think we’re very unique in Washington state to be able to actually do this in a way that really is mindful of our values, of the environment, and also pushing for innovation as well,” he said.
At the same time, Nguyen said demand for AI and data centers is market-driven, and it isn’t fair to criticize data centers while using them every day.
“For anybody who’s upset with data centers, I hope that when you email me, don’t email me,” he said. “Print it off and walk it to my office.”
Update, Oct. 27: Protesters interrupted the opening session of WTIA’s Seattle AI Summit six times Tuesday morning, during an on-stage interview of OpenAI’s Vijaye Raji by GeekWire’s Todd Bishop. They objected to AI-related job losses, the climate impact of data centers, OpenAI’s ties to the Trump administration and the leadership of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 19–23.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
TL;DR: PHP released fixes for two critical flaws on October 21 and urged immediate updates. Crypto businesses using PHP-based web infrastructure should check that layer of their systems; the advisory does not announce a breach of Bitcoin or BTCPay Server itself.
Security work for a crypto business does not end at its wallet. A critical PHP update has put ordinary web-server software back on the operational agenda.
The PHP project’s October 21 advisory identifies two vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. Fixed upstream releases are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. The project strongly encourages affected users to update immediately.
It says installations serving web requests are at risk and highlights the Apache mod_php configuration as particularly exposed. Distribution vendors may provide patched packages, so the applicable fix depends on how the software is supplied and maintained.
The connection to crypto commerce is practical. BTCPay Server’s official documentation explains how merchants can connect its payment system to WooCommerce, including arrangements involving an existing store or a deployed store environment.
A merchant using that combination has several components to maintain. The checkout website, its plugins, the hosting environment and the payment service have distinct responsibilities. Updating one component does not establish that every other part of the stack has been patched.
The PHP advisory is about the runtime handling web requests. It is not evidence that Bitcoin’s protocol has been compromised, and it does not by itself identify a flaw in BTCPay Server’s core software.
It does provide a reason for administrators and hosting providers to check whether any connected storefront or service uses an affected PHP installation. The relevant confirmation is that the running environment contains the fix, rather than simply that an application plugin was updated.
The PHP team’s guidance is the authoritative starting point for remediation and version-specific details. Unsupported installations need particular attention to vendor support or migration to a maintained release.
No claim about stolen customer funds or a specific crypto company’s compromise is established by the advisory. The immediate news is the release of critical fixes for infrastructure that can sit underneath a crypto payment experience.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Seattle embraced the global spotlight and rode a wave of economic euphoria when the FIFA World Cup came to town this summer, but according to new voter data out Tuesday, the city let that momentum slip away just as downtown businesses and major tech employers grapple with an ongoing economic squeeze.
The eleventh edition of The Index, a semiannual survey tracking voter sentiment commissioned by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, reveals a sharp erosion in public confidence regarding the city’s economic trajectory.
According to polling of 700 Seattle voters conducted from Sept. 23 to Oct. 1 by public opinion research firm Fulcrum Strategic Group, 68% believe the city’s economy is getting weaker, 22% think it’s staying the same, and just 10% say it’s stronger.
While voters point to persistent quality-of-life concerns like public safety, homelessness and affordability, the findings underscore growing anxiety over Seattle’s business climate, at a time when major tech employers continue to evaluate their regional footprint and shift jobs across Lake Washington.
Seattle Metro Chamber President and CEO Joe Nguyen said the World Cup brought an energy and excitement downtown that was real and positive. But after a few months, there’s been no sustained honeymoon, and 65% of voters feel Seattle is losing positive momentum on public safety and quality of life.
“We demonstrated as a region what is possible when we all work together, and folks are already feeling that shift away,” Nguyen said during a media briefing Tuesday.
While chief concerns in the survey center on crime and public safety, economic health follows closely behind. In addition to widespread pessimism about the city’s overall trajectory, 71% of respondents agree that businesses are closing down or leaving for nearby cities because the cost of doing business in Seattle has gotten too high. Furthermore, 95% of those surveyed say it is difficult for small businesses to operate in the city.
When it comes to major employers — the tech giants and large corporations such as Amazon that anchor the regional economy and bear the brunt of taxes like the city’s JumpStart payroll levy — the survey reveals a striking disconnect.
The survey found 70% of voters recognize large businesses as essential to Seattle’s success, defying the narrative that the local electorate is anti-business. Andrew Thibault, partner at survey conductor Fulcrum Strategic Group, called it “the most interesting section” in the whole survey.
“Voters here deeply understand that their quality of life is connected to the health of the business environment and our ability to afford the things that we want to afford, like transit and schools, and environmental protections,” Thibault said. “All of those depend on a healthy business environment.”
But a significant knowledge gap persists around tax contributions. Voters estimated on average that large businesses pay just 37% of the city’s total tax revenue, with three-quarters believing that figure sits below 50%. In actuality, businesses pay 68% — more than two-thirds — of all city taxes, according to a recent tax analysis from the Chamber.
Underlying economic anxiety is playing out directly in City Hall’s budget debates. As major employers and tech giants navigate a shifting economic landscape — including recent reports showing downtown Seattle shedding 13,000 jobs in a single year while neighboring Bellevue’s tech hub expanded — voters are demanding a tighter rein on city spending.
The Index reveals that 66% of Seattle voters distrust the city to spend tax dollars responsibly, and nearly eight in 10 support requiring City Hall to prove existing spending is producing results before asking residents or major employers to pay more.
Those sentiments carry heavy weight as the city grapples with its budget. Facing what officials call “seismic shifts” in the tech sector, Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed budget attempts to close a massive deficit through spending cuts while freezing the rates for corporate levies like the JumpStart payroll tax.
For Nguyen and the Chamber, the message from voters is clear: City Hall must focus on tangible delivery with existing resources rather than continuous policy shifts and progressive tax increases.
Pointing to the city’s reliance on core revenue streams like business and occupation (B&O), sales, and JumpStart taxes, Nguyen emphasized the risk of over-targeting a concentrated corporate base.
“Finagling with it too much creates a problem where the people who are reliant upon paying the taxes are also the ones being targeted,” Nguyen said. “So if they leave, it creates a multiplier effect in the wrong direction.”
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Seattle’s tax collections have nearly tripled over the past decade, soaring from $900 million in 2013 to a projected $2.8 billion in 2026. But who pays those taxes, and how the tax revenue is collected, looks vastly different today than a decade ago.
A new report released by ECOnorthwest, commissioned jointly by the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, show city tax revenues far outstripping population and job growth, driven by targeted corporate taxes on a small pool of major employers.
Between 2013 and 2025, Seattle’s tax revenues jumped 172%, outpacing population growth (31%), job growth (23%), and local inflation (50%). During that period, real tax growth grew 5.6 times faster than population and 7.5 times faster than employment.
The findings come as city leaders, major tech employers and regional business groups grapple with shifting post-pandemic work patterns and a political climate that has frequently placed large technology companies like Amazon in its sights.
According to the report, broad-based core taxes, such as property, sales, utility, and general Business & Occupation (B&O) taxes, comprised 83% of city tax collections in 2013. By 2026, those core broad taxes are projected to drop to just 52% of the total revenue.
Replacing them are narrow, targeted tax levies:
Combined, two taxes that did not exist five years ago now account for nearly a third of all business tax dollars collected by the city. Overlap among top taxpayers means fewer than 20 companies account for roughly $356 million in annual City of Seattle revenue.
“Seattle’s tax collections are growing far faster than its population, jobs or inflation. Employers are carrying more of that burden. That trajectory is not sustainable,” said Seattle Metro Chamber president & CEO Joe Nguyen. “The question cannot always be how to collect more money. It must be how to deliver better results with the money we already have and build a tax structure that helps our economy grow.”
The heavy pivot to business revenue coincides with divergent employment trends between Seattle and its neighboring Eastside hubs.
Between March 2020 and March 2025, Seattle lost approximately 24,000 jobs, while the remainder of King County added 21,000. The report notes that Seattle lost 18,000 jobs in the single year leading up to March 2025 alone. And that figure that does not yet capture the full impact of major remote work policies and tech layoffs announced across the region.
The report arrives on the heels of previous GeekWire coverage tracking regional tech dynamics, including the shift of high tech jobs from Seattle to Bellevue, as well as broader political shifts in how West Coast hubs are responding to tech sector backlash and the AI boom.
However, in a sign that Mayor Katie Wilson is paying close attention to tech-sector headwinds and shifting job patterns, she proposed a $9.1 billion 2027 budget that would erase a $175 million general fund deficit and cut nearly $50 million in spending while freezing JumpStart tax rates.
Amazon announced new AI tools for its independent sellers Wednesday, led by a plugin that lets them run their Amazon businesses from Anthropic’s Claude or Amazon’s own Quick assistant.
The idea is to let sellers check inventory, adjust prices and update listings without opening Seller Central, which merchants have used for years to manage their Amazon businesses. Amazon says about 90% of sellers already use some form of outside AI to run parts of their operations.
“Our vision was that they would never have to log into Seller Central,” said Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, in an interview. “We would just bring it to them where they work.”
The company is making the announcement at Accelerate, its annual seller conference, taking place in Seattle this week. It’s also releasing automations that monitor a seller’s business in the background and can act on it with the seller’s approval, and an upgraded Seller Assistant that remembers a seller’s pricing patterns, inventory cycles and growth goals from one session to the next.
The stakes: Independent sellers account for more than 60% of units sold on Amazon worldwide, and the fees Amazon charges them brought in $46.8 billion in the second quarter, more revenue than AWS.
Those fees are one of the issues in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Amazon, which accuses the company of overcharging sellers and punishing them for offering lower prices elsewhere. Amazon has denied the allegations and called the suit “wrong on the facts and the law.”
The case is set for trial in March 2027 in federal court in Seattle.
Amazon’s advertising business, which includes the sponsored listings sellers buy to promote their products, brought in $19.8 billion in the quarter, up 26% from a year earlier. When it filed the case, the FTC said advertising had become “virtually necessary for sellers to do business,” and that Amazon’s combined fees take close to half of many sellers’ revenue.
Sellers are a tough and pragmatic crowd. The loudest ovation at last year’s Accelerate went to a housekeeping fix rather than a new tool, when Amazon ended commingling, the practice of mixing identical inventory from different sellers in its warehouses.
Which agents get in: By starting to officially connect its seller tools to outside AI platforms, Amazon is loosening its grip on the technology sellers use to manage their presence in the company’s e-commerce store, although it still decides which platforms to support.
The announcement comes days after Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse, a new AI agent that can shop on behalf of consumers, from its store. Amazon says outside agents need to identify themselves and follow the rules of the sites they use.
Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, and the AI company’s Claude models already power Seller Assistant, the AI technology built into the Seller Central portal that answers sellers’ questions and, with their approval, updates listings and prices.
The company says more integrations will follow Claude and Quick. “We’ve built this in a way that should be modular enough for us to continue to publish plugins,” Westmoreland said.
How it works: Amazon says connecting Claude takes about 60 seconds and no coding. The plugin pulls a seller’s listings, inventory levels, sales analytics and performance metrics into the outside assistant, which can then act on the account the way Seller Assistant does inside Seller Central.
Sellers choose which types of data the plugin can reach and approve each action before it’s carried out. The company says it doesn’t see the other business data in a seller’s assistant.
The plugin is in beta in Amazon’s U.S. stores, with international expansion to follow.
Among other announcements, Seller Assistant is getting a new canvas feature, a visual workspace generated on the fly from a seller’s live data. Sellers can use it to compare pricing strategies or diagnose ad campaigns, and it redraws as they ask follow-up questions.
In addition, Amazon says it’s giving every primary selling account holder worldwide a free 12-month subscription to Amazon Quick Plus, available through Dec. 31, 2026, with two additional co-workers covered at no cost.
This year’s event comes amid a leadership change in the seller organization. Amit Agarwal, a 27-year Amazon veteran who launched its India marketplace, took over selling partner services in February as Dharmesh Mehta moved to become CEO Andy Jassy’s technical advisor.
Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse AI agent from its store Sunday night, and leaders across the tech industry have spent the past two days debating the bigger questions raised by the move.
Among them: whether the big platforms will agree on rules for agents crossing into each other’s territory, how money will change hands when they do, and how many people will actually want AI agents doing their shopping in the first place.
This will be “a bigger battle than anyone anticipates,” wrote Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora in a post on X, predicting that Apple, Google and possibly TikTok will build their own personal agents. Every shopping and services app will have to decide whether to let outside agents in, he wrote.
The industry is “basically two weeks into this entire topic,” Box CEO Aaron Levie said on CNBC Tuesday morning. Agents are “going to change how we interact with most forms of commerce,” he said, and “different companies will respond in different ways.”
Elon Musk is already pointing to a potential technical loophole. Amazon “won’t be able to tell whether the buyer is a human or an AI acting on their behalf if access is via the user’s IP address & cookies,” the xAI founder wrote on X Monday.
Amazon’s Conditions of Use require agents to identify themselves as agents in every request they make to its site. That is one of the violations that Amazon cited in blocking Muse this weekend.
Deals in the works? Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said on earnings calls that the company was having conversations with companies that want to run agents for commerce. Those talks are still underway, The Information reported Monday, but it’s not clear whether any agreements are close to happening.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the Sources podcast that Muse would “take a very small cut of whatever the transaction is” — potentially paid by the businesses users buy from.
Amazon’s retail margins are thin, and its advertising business, which generated more than $68 billion in revenue last year, depends on people browsing its pages, not agents jumping in to complete purchases.
Amazon vs. Perplexity: Possibly foreshadowing where the Meta dispute is headed, Amazon sued Perplexity in November over Comet, the AI company’s browser, which had an agent that shopped on Amazon.com through customers’ own accounts.
Amazon won a preliminary order blocking it in March, then lost that order on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit found Amazon unlikely to win its anti-hacking claim, because the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon’s computers. The court denied Amazon’s request for a rehearing on Sept. 10.
The underlying case is still going, and the decision did leave Amazon an opening. It said Amazon could still sue over its contract with customers, and on Monday Amazon did just that: adding a claim that Perplexity caused customers to break that agreement, the same Conditions of Use the company used to block Muse.
What about Amazon’s agent? The e-commerce giant’s Buy for Me agent “does some of the things that Amazon is trying to stop other AI agents from doing,” pointed out journalist Jason Del Rey, who publishes The Aisle newsletter. Amazon’s answer is that Buy for Me identifies itself and lets brands opt out, two things it says Muse doesn’t do.
Meta, for the record, has not responded publicly to the Amazon dispute. But investors have. Meta stock jumped 11% Monday to its highest close in a year, and rose again Tuesday morning.
After all of this, are agents really better shoppers? Martin Peers of The Information used Muse on Monday to buy a pen and a notebook from small retailers. He found the process “surprisingly smooth,” but wrote that it was “still a lot faster and easier to go directly to Amazon.”
Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience.
The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks.
As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”
“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.
The company said previously that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that credentials a user shares “go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.”
Business partners: The standoff between the tech giants is especially notable because the two companies work together: Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s Graviton chips.
It’s part of a larger debate over who controls the online shopping experience and the customer relationship when AI agents buy items on behalf of consumers.
Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI.
On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment.
The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
Security implications: Muse can reach account pages and order history if a customer prompts it to do so, Amazon says. Because the agent doesn’t identify itself, the company says, that amounts to an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts, processing transactions and handling sensitive data without Amazon’s knowledge or consent.
Amazon said agents that operate openly help keep the customer experience safe and reliable, and that other services buying on a customer’s behalf typically do so with the merchant’s agreement. It cited food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with.
“Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” Amazon’s spokesperson said in the statement.
Legal maneuvering: Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon’s computers under federal anti-hacking law.
The court denied Amazon’s petition for rehearing on Sept. 10. However, the ruling left one avenue open for Amazon: claims built on contracts and terms of service. The message Muse users are now seeing doesn’t accuse anyone of hacking but cites Amazon’s Conditions of Use.
How Muse works: Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal agent that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one-off questions, connecting to services including email, calendar, payments, dining and shopping.
It’s free, with paid subscription tiers, and available on iOS, Android, muse.ai and WhatsApp.
Meta says the agent runs on a secure virtual machine, with its own browser, and checks with the user before sensitive actions like sending an email or making a purchase. A separate monitoring agent called Sentinel has to approve anything Muse sends to the internet.
The Muse launch materials describe the mechanism now at the center of the dispute: If a service has a public API, Muse can connect to it using credentials the user provides. If it has no API at all, Meta says, the agent “can use the service through a browser the way you would.”
Muse has caught on fast. A week after launch, it became the No. 1 free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. Early users have described it switching an auto insurance policy, hunting down discount codes at checkout, and loading an online grocery cart.
Amazon launched Alexa for Shopping in May, an AI agent that researches products and makes recommendations. Its own agentic shopping feature, Buy for Me, finds items on external brands’ sites, but the company points out that Buy for Me identifies itself and lets brands opt out.
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