Consumer Spending on the Rebound
Consumer spending as a whole is set to rebound strongly post Covid19. However, the recovery is likely to be uneven with high-income households with members who could work remotely being in a better position to spend.
Low-income households will likely not return to 2019 spending levels by 2024, especially US families that have lost jobs and face income uncertainty.
Full article: https://lnkd.in/dxs6bcG
Source: HBR
Facebook’s Libra faces anti-trust review by EU watchdogs
Competition watchdogs at the European Commission have begun probing potential anti-trust issues relating to Facebook’s digital currency project Libra.
The European Commission is “currently investigating potential anti-competitive behavior” related to the Libra Association amid concerns the proposed payment system would unfairly shut out rivals, the EU authority said in a questionnaire seen by Bloomberg and sent out earlier this month.
Officials said they’re concerned about how Libra may create “possible competition restrictions” on the information that will be exchanged and the use of consumer data, according to the document.
Klarna becomes most valuable EU fintech with $5.5bn valuation
Klarna has become the largest private fintech start-up in Europe after a new funding round valued the Swedish payments group at $5.5bn ahead of a potential stock market flotation.
The Swedish “buy now and pay later” company raised $460m in equity from investors including Silicon Valley venture capital company Dragoneer, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and funds managed by the world’s largest asset management group BlackRock.
Klarna’s valuation has risen from $2.5bn at the start of this year to $3.5bn in April when existing shareholders such as Hennes & Mauritz, Sequoia Capital and Permira invested fresh equity to today’s post-money valuation of $5.5bn, ranking it as the eighth most valuable private fintech globally.
Read the article.
Microsoft office violated GDPR rules
“Microsoft systematically collects data on a large scale about the individual use of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Covertly, without informing people,” said in a blog post written by Privacy Company summarizing its report. Privacy Company was hired by the Netherlands government to probe the use of Office in the public sector.
“Microsoft systematically collects data on a large scale about the individual use of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Covertly, without informing people. Microsoft does not offer any choice with regard to the amount of data, or the possibility to switch off the collection, or ability to see what data are collected, because the data stream is encoded. Similar to this practice in Windows 10, Microsoft has included separate software in the Office software that regularly sends telemetry data to its own servers in the United States.
For example, Microsoft collects information about events in Word, when you use the backspace key a number of times in a row, which probably means you do not know the correct spelling. But also the sentence before and after a word that you look up in the online spelling checker or translation service. Microsoft not only collects use data via the inbuilt telemetry client, but also records and stores the individual use of Connected Services. For example, if users access a Connected Service such as the translate service through the Office software, Microsoft can store the personal data about this usage in so-called system-generated event logs.”
The results of this Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) are alarming. Microsoft collects and stores personal data about the behaviour of individual employees on a large scale, without any public documentation.
The DPIA report (in English) as published by the Ministry is available here.