The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect today, and the web will never be the same, in Europe at least. Internal wrangling at companies between the legal, sales, marketing, editorial, and other departments has determined what approach to take to stay on the right side of the strict new rules, and the conclusions vary widely.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping law that takes effect later this week, is a big deal. How big? According to Google search volume, it’s bigger than Beyoncé:
The Chinese calendar has yet to reward dogecoin, the crypto-joke-coin created by technologist Jackson Palmer. The year of the dog began Feb. 16, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, but since then the digital token has dropped 26%, more than double bitcoin’s decline during that span.
This week, Australia’s statistics agency reported that the country received a record number of Chinese tourists. The ranks of visitors from mainland China have swelled so much that they now outnumber New Zealanders, long the top source of tourists to Australia.
Dance music pioneer Tim Bergling, known by the stage name Avicii, was found dead yesterday (April 20) in Muscat, Oman. The Swedish superstar DJ was 28.
In early March, Donald Trump’s White House unveiled tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. “Trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump tweeted at the time. The subsequent tit-for-tat escalation of protectionist measures between the US and China, in particular, are putting that notion to the test.
Apple ended a rough week by announcing that a fault in some MacBook Pro laptops have a faulty component that “may fail causing the built-in battery to expand.” It is not a safety issue, the company added.
No big bank will remember 2008 fondly. That was the year that Lehman Brothers blew up, subprime mortgage-backed securities soured, and the global financial system was generally brought to its knees. Bailouts and strict new regulations followed, with policymakers pushing to rein in the profitable but risky behavior that flourished before the crash. In the future, banking would be a safer but leaner business.
Mark Zuckerberg is $11 billion poorer than he was around this time last month.
Escalating trade skirmishes broke out between Washington and Beijing this week, with investors caught in the middle. Although the S&P 500, for the moment, is trading roughly where it started the week, it’s been a wild ride…
The nascent trade war between the United States and China continues to escalate. A few days ago, China announced tariffs on 128 American products, covering close to $3 billion worth of US exports. Now, the Trump administration is preparing to retaliate, proposing import tariffs on 1,300 categories of Chinese products worth some $50 billion.
Facebook announced today (March 28) that is redesigning its privacy controls to make it easier for users to access, alter, and erase the data the social network has stored about them. “Most of these updates have been in the works for some time, but the events of the past several days underscore their importance,” the company said in a statement.
For Facebook, how bad can it get? The company lost $50 billion in market value in the first two trading days after it emerged that over 50 million of its users unknowingly had their data harvested in service of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
This week, the value of Facebook, Inc. has fallen by some $50 billion. And it’s only Tuesday.
Following revelations that Trump consultant Cambridge Analytica collected and exploited the data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their permission, the company took a massive hit, losing about $40 billion in market value on Monday morning.
Donald Trump’s chief economic advisor Gary Cohn is leaving the White House, and the markets aren’t happy.
“Overall, management is not satisfied with the financial results.”
“The market is getting a bit bored now of the black rectangles.”
In almost every sense, $100 billion is a lot of money. For a company the size of Apple, though, it’s a small fraction of its current $900 billion market cap. And given the company’s current trajectory, the iPhone maker seems the best bet to become the first trillion-dollar listed company sometime this year. Other tech giants like Amazon and Alphabet have an outside shot, too.
Amazon, so long light on profits, reported a whopping $1.86 billion in net income in the fourth quarter of 2017.
In Davos this week, 3,000 world leaders and business bosses attended hundreds of talks, workshops, dinners, and other get-togethers. The takeaway: Artificial intelligence and climate change are going to ruin us, but blockchain and women are going to save us.
Davos, Switzerland
The theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos this year is “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.” The official program features more than 400 sessions over four days (Jan. 23-26), heavy on the economic and geopolitical abstractions for which the elite gathering has become (in)famous. Expect earnest panel discussions between world leaders and captains of industry about “skilling up for the fourth industrial revolution” and “navigating a multipolar and multiconceptual world.”
“People in this country have had enough of experts,” pro-Brexit minister Michael Gove famously proclaimed just before Britain voted to quit the EU, defying the warnings of economists, analysts, and other professional forecasters. A central conceit of many populist campaigns is that the ordinary voter’s common sense, however derived, outweighs any naysaying by eggheads in their ivory towers.
