The U.S. Supreme Court slashed the Federal Trade Commission's power to seek monetary awards in court, throwing out a legal tool the consumer-protection agency has used to collect billions of dollars over the past decade. From a report: The justices on Thursday unanimously said the FTC can't seek consumer redress when it invokes a provision that lets the agency go straight to federal court to try to stop an alleged fraud. The ruling is a triumph for business trade groups, which urged the court to curb the agency's powers. The FTC in 2012 dramatically ramped up its use of the decades-old provision to recoup money. The agency reported winning so-called restitution and disgorgement of almost $12 billion in 2016 alone, including $10 billion in a settlement with Volkswagen AG stemming from its diesel-emissions scandal. Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said the FTC retains other avenues to get restitution for consumers, though those tools involve a more complicated process. "If the commission believes that authority too cumbersome or otherwise inadequate, it is, of course, free to ask Congress to grant it further remedial authority," Breyer wrote.

TikTok is facing a legal challenge from former children's commissioner for England Anne Longfield over how it collects and uses children's data. The BBC reports: The claim is being filed on behalf of millions of children in the UK and EU who have used the hugely popular video-sharing app. If successful, the children affected could each be owed thousands of pounds. TikTok said the case was without merit and it would fight it.

Lawyers will allege that TikTok takes children's personal information, including phone numbers, videos, exact location and biometric data, without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law, and without children or parents knowing what is being done with that information. The claim is being launched on behalf of all children who have used TikTok since 25 May 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings. Children not wishing to be represented can opt out. "TikTok is a hugely popular social media platform that has helped children keep in touch with their friends during an incredibly difficult year," says Ms. Longfield. "However, behind the fun songs, dance challenges and lip-sync trends lies something far more sinister."

She alleges the firm is "a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network" which has "deliberately and successfully deceived parents." She added that those parents have a "right to know" what private information is being collected via TikTok's "shadowy data collection practices."

In response, TikTok said: "Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action."

Amazon One is now testing its palm-scanning payment technology in Whole Foods, starting with a single store in Amazon's home city of Seattle. The Verge reports: The company has been using Amazon One payment technology in its Amazon-branded stores in the Seattle area (including Amazon Go and Amazon Books), but the Whole Foods rollout will make the most substantial expansion of the technology yet. The company says that thousands of customers have already signed up with Amazon One. According to an Amazon FAQ, the palm-scanning technology analyzes "the minute characteristics of your palm -- both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns" in order to identify a customer, allowing them to use the biometric scan as an alternative (and, theoretically, faster) method of checking out than fumbling around with a credit card or cash.

Customers will be able to register their palms at kiosks in the supported Whole Foods stores, allowing them to associate a physical credit card to that palm scan. And of course, Amazon One users will be able to link their Prime accounts to their scans to get the subscription service's discounts when shopping. Amazon One will debut at the Madison Broadway Whole Foods in Seattle as an additional payment option for customers, with plans to expand it to seven other Whole Foods stores in the Seattle area over the next few months. Amazon hasn't announced plans to further build out the palm-scanning payment system outside of the Seattle area.

The Bank of England and the Treasury have announced they are setting up a taskforce to explore the possibility of a central bank digital currency. From a report: The aim is to look at the risks and opportunities involved in creating a new kind of digital money. Issued by the Bank for use by households and businesses, it would exist alongside cash and bank deposits, rather than replacing them. No decision has been taken on whether to have such a currency in the UK. However, the government and the Bank want to "engage widely with stakeholders" on the benefits and practicalities of doing so. The taskforce will be jointly led by the Bank's deputy governor for financial stability, Sir Jon Cunliffe, and the Treasury's director general of financial services, Katharine Braddick. The Bank has previously said it is interested in a central bank digital currency (CBDC) because "this is a period of significant change in money and payments." The use of cash in financial transactions has been steadily declining in recent years, while debit card payments have been on the rise. Use of credit cards and direct debits have also been increasing.

A one-man Bunco Squad is poking holes in Apple's App Store image. From a report: Recently, I reached out to the most profitable company in the world to ask a series of basic questions. I wanted to understand: how is a single man making the entire Apple App Store review team look silly? Particularly now that Apple's in the fight of its life, both in the courts and in Congress later today, to prove its App Store is a well-run system that keeps users safe instead of a monopoly that needs to be broken up. That man's name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he's made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store.

He's repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a "free trial" of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don't understand how to cancel. "It's a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place," he tells The Verge. There's a lot to unpack there: fake free trials, fake reviews, subscription awareness. We could write an entire story about each. Today, I'd like to focus on how one guy could find what Apple's $64-billion-a-year App Store apparently cannot, because the answer is remarkable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: The company plans to start selling subscriptions to podcasts and keeping a slice of each transaction for itself. Apple CEO Tim Cook briefly mentioned plans to roll out a subscription feature during the company's keynote event Tuesday, without offering more details. But a person familiar with Apple's plans has spelled it out to Recode:

- Starting next month, Apple will let podcast publishers sell subscriptions to individual shows or groups of shows, and set their own pricing, starting at 49 cents a month in the US.
- Apple won't require podcasters to create Apple-only exclusive shows, but it does want them to distinguish between stuff they're already distributing via Apple and stuff going up on other platforms: That could mean ad-free shows or shows with extra content or brand-new shows that only exist on Apple.
- Apple will keep 30 percent of any subscription revenue creators generate in their first year on the platform. After that, Apple's cut will drop to 15 percent. That's the same pricing scheme Apple already uses for other subscription services, like TV streamers.

PayPal on Tuesday will begin allowing select customers of its Venmo app to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies as consumers increasingly look for ways to pile into the digital assets. Bloomberg reports: The firm will make it available to all the app's users, who number more than 70 million, within the next few weeks. For now, Venmo is allowing customers to trade in just four types of cryptocurrency: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. Users will also have the ability to share their cryptocurrency purchases on the Venmo feed.

"We do think some customers will certainly want to share this fun experience," Darrell Esch, senior vice president and general manager of the Venmo app at PayPal, said in an interview. "They can share with their friends and community that they've taken the step into this space."

Online electronics retailer Newegg said it is now accepting dogecoin as a method of payment. From a report: Customers will be able to complete transactions using the dogecoin held in their BitPay wallet, according to an announcement Tuesday. Newegg first began accepting payments in bitcoin in July 2014. The company is now among the first retailers to accept dogecoin as payment. Further reading: Dogecoin Rips in Meme-Fueled Frenzy on Pot-Smoking Holiday.

Google shifted more than $75.4 billion in profits out of the Republic using the controversial "double-Irish" tax arrangement in 2019, the last year in which it used the loophole. From a report: The technology giant availed of the tax arrangement to move the money out of Google Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company via interim dividends and other payments. This company was incorporated in Ireland but tax domiciled in Bermuda at the time of the transfer.

The move allowed Google Ireland Holdings to escape corporation tax both in the Republic and in the United States where its ultimate parent, Alphabet, is headquartered. The holding company reported a $13 billion pretax profit for 2019, which was effectively tax-free, the accounts show. A year earlier, Google Ireland Holdings paid out dividends of 23 billion euros, having recorded turnover of $25.7 billion. Google has used the double Irish loophole to funnel billions in global profits through Ireland and on to Bermuda, effectively putting them beyond the reach of US tax authorities. Companies exploiting the double Irish put their intellectual property into an Irish-registered company that is controlled from a tax haven such as Bermuda.

"The mania that drove crypto assets to records as Coinbase went public last week turned on itself on the weekend," report Bloomberg — as the price of bitcoin took a big dive: The world's biggest cryptocurrency plunged as much as 15% on Sunday, just days after reaching a record of $64,869. It subsequently pared some of the losses and was trading at about $56,440 at around 8:25 a.m. in Tokyo Monday. Ether, the second-biggest token, dropped as much as 18% to below $2,000 before also paring losses. The volatility buffeted Binance Coin, XRP and Cardano too.

Dogecoin — the token started as a joke — bucked the trend and is up 7% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

The weekend carnage came after a heady period for the industry that saw the value of all coins surge past $2.25 trillion amid a frenzy of demand for all things crypto in the runup to Coinbase's direct listing on Wednesday. The largest U.S. crypto exchange ended the week valued at $68 billion, more than the owner of the New York Stock Exchange... Dogecoin, which has limited use and no fundamentals, rallied last week to be worth about $50 billion at one point before stumbling Saturday. Demand was so brisk for the token that investors trying to trade it on Robinhood crashed the site a few times Friday, the online exchange said in a blog post.

There was also speculation Sunday in several online reports that the crypto plunge was related to concerns the U.S. Treasury may crack down on money laundering carried out through digital assets... Besides the "unsubstantiated" report of a U.S. Treasury crackdown, Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of crypto lender Nexo, said factors for the declines may have included "excess leverage, Coinbase insiders dumping equity after the direct listing and a mass outage in China's Xinjiang province hitting Bitcoin miners."

Gizmodo reports: The latest big name to get in on the NFT craze is former intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, who on Friday auctioned off an original NFT art piece for roughly $5.4 million worth of the cryptocurrency Ether. Titled "Stay Free", it's a digital self-portrait made out of pages from a U.S. Court of Appeals decision that ruled the National Security Agency's widespread surveillance of phone records violated the law, a practice Snowden brought to light in 2013 by leaking classified NSA secrets to journalists...

The NFT sold for 2,224 Ether, worth just over $5.4 million at the time of publishing. All proceeds from this sale will go to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit that develops open-source tools for whistleblowers and works to shield journalists from state-sponsored hackers and government surveillance. Snowden has led the organization as president since 2017.

In 2018 Oracle's Larry Ellison bought the historic Cal Neva Lodge on the scenic north shore of California's Lake Tahoe for $36 million. Then in 2019 Mark Zuckerberg bought a $59 million compound on Lake Tahoe's west shore.

But now a wave of techies are moving in, reports Outside magazine, "freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes. They migrated, laptops in tow, to mountain towns all over the West, transforming them into modern-day boomtowns: 'Zoom-towns.'" "It's the wildest time," says realtor Katey Brandenburg, who works on Tahoe's Nevada side. For her and other realtors around the lake, the autumn of 2020 felt like winning the lottery. "I paid off a lifetime of debt — 28 years of loans, college, credit cards, and cars — in three months."

All told, 2020 saw more than 2,350 homes sold across the Tahoe Basin, for a boggling $3.28 billion, up from $1.76 billion in 2019, according to data analyzed by Sierra Sotheby's. That $3 billion stat is on a par with 2020 home-sales revenues in Aspen, Colorado (albeit there, the latest average home-sale price came in at $11 million). The trend is in line with real estate records being shattered from Sun Valley, Idaho, to Stowe, Vermont. And according to a just-released market update, it hasn't stopped: in the first quarter of 2021, median prices for single-family homes increased by an astronomical 70 percent year over year in Truckee, 72 percent in South Lake, and 81 percent in Incline Village...

"A disproportionate number of people who purchased homes in Tahoe in 2020 are employees of some of the largest tech companies in the Bay Area," says Deniz Kahramaner, founder of Atlasa, a real estate brokerage firm that specializes in data analytics. Of the 2,280 new-home buyers Atlasa identified throughout the Tahoe region in 2020, roughly 30 percent worked at software companies. The top three employers were Google (54 buyers), Apple (46), and Facebook (34)...

There is, however, one glaring issue with all this rapid, high-priced growth: the people who actually make a mountain town run — the ski instructors and patrollers, lift operators and shuttle drivers, housekeepers and snowcat mechanics, cooks and servers — can no longer afford to live there.
The article does note higher property taxes going toward public services (along with "more money eventually pumping into bars and restaurants.") And it also acknowledges affordable housing has for decades been an issue in tourist towns.

"It's just suddenly on steroids..."

On Thursday, a federal jury in Seattle, Washington, found that former IBM sales manager Scott Kingston had been unlawfully fired by the company and denied sales commission after challenging the treatment of subordinates as racially biased. And it awarded him $11.1 million. The Register reports: The case dates back to 2017 when two IBM sales people within months of each other closed similarly large software sales deals that led to vastly different commission payments. Nick Donato, who is White, received more than $1m for a SAS Institute deal, while Jerome Beard, who is Black, was paid about $230,000 for closing a sale to HCL Technologies. Beard was paid about 15 per cent of what he should have received under his agreement with IBM, despite a company policy not to cap sales commissions.

Kingston, who managed the two salespeople through two lower-level managers, raised his concerns about racial discrimination with his superiors toward the end of 2017. Recalling his jury testimony, he said of his conversation with his managers, "They were telling me it wasn't about money; it was some other reason. I flat out said, 'You are leaving no possibility for anybody to conclude another reason than racial discrimination. You are foreclosing any other possible conclusion. You are going to get us sued.'" And that's what happened. Beard sued IBM in 2018. After a failed motion by IBM to dismiss the case in April, 2020, the company settled for an undisclosed sum several months later.

Kingston sued in 2019 [PDF], after IBM fired him in April, 2018, claiming he had erred in approving Donato's seven-figure commission. The company also fired two other IBM managers, Andre Temidis and Michael Lee, who raised similar objections to the allegedly discriminatory capping of commission due to an Arab-American salesperson. The Seattle jury found [PDF] IBM violated Washington State law against discrimination and policies against race discrimination and withholding wages. "We are disappointed by the jury's verdict," IBM said in a statement emailed to The Register. "IBM does not condone retaliation, race discrimination, or any other form of discrimination. The company will consider all of its options on appeal."

Dogecoin has seen its price rise by a factor of five over the last week. Yesterday, it was trading at $0.13. Today, it's one of the world's 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of $45 billion. Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee writes: Dogecoin's price tripled over the next 36 hours. My editor suggested that I write about whether Dogecoin's rise is a sign of an overheated crypto market, but for a coin like Dogecoin, I'm not sure that's even a meaningful concept. Dogecoin isn't a company that has revenues or profits. And unlike bitcoin and ether, no one seriously thinks it's going to be the foundation of a new financial system. People are trading Dogecoin because it's fun to trade and because they think they might make money from it. The rising price is a sign that a lot of people have decided it would be fun to speculate in Dogecoin.

Of course, the fact that lots of people have money to spend on joke investments might itself be a result of larger macroeconomic forces. The combination of stimulus spending, low interest rates, and pandemic-related saving means that a lot of people have more money than usual sitting in their bank accounts. And restrictions on travel and nightlife mean that many of those same people have a lot of time on their hands.

According to app developer Kosta Eleftheriou, Apple's App Store hosted a kid's game that's actually a front for gambling websites. "The secret password isn't one you'd be likely to guess: you have to be in the right country -- or pretend to be in the right country using a VPN," writes Sean Hollister via The Verge. "But then, instead of launching an ugly monkey-flipping endless runner game filled with typos and bugs, the very same app launches a casino experience." From the report: The app, "Jungle Runner 2k21," has already disappeared from the App Store, presumably thanks to publicity from Gizmodo and Daring Fireball, who each wrote about Eleftheriou's finding earlier today. It's not the only one, though: the same developer, "Colin Malachi," had another incredibly basic game on the App Store called "Magical Forest - Puzzle" that was also a front for gambling. [...] I accessed them from a VPN server in Turkey; While Daring Fireball notes that users in other non-US countries like Italy also seem to have been able to access the gambling sites, I tried them with a number of other locations including Italy without success.

Unlike the multi-million dollar App Store scams that Eleftheriou uncovered earlier this year, it's not hard to see why Apple's App Store review program might have missed these -- they largely look like your typical shovelware if you don't know the trick, with only a handful of tells... like the fact that Jungle Runner uses a Pastebin for its privacy policies. It's not necessarily clear to me that they'd be violating very many of Apple's App Store policies, either. Gambling apps are permitted by Apple, as long as they're geo-restricted to regions where that gambling is permitted by law, and you could maybe argue that's exactly what this developer did by checking your IP address.

Regulators in Massachusetts are seeking to revoke Robinhood's broker-dealer license in the state, after accusing the company of failing to properly account for fractional shares traded by customers on its platform. They also say the company "continues to entice and induce inexperienced customers into risky trading." CNN reports: The battle began in December when regulators in Massachusetts filed a 24-page complaint against Robinhood accusing the company of violating state law and regulations by failing to protect customers and safeguard its system. Officials alleged Robinhood lured inexperienced investors to its platform with gaming elements such as colorful confetti -- a practice that the company recently said it is getting rid of. The amended complaint filed Thursday says Robinhood has continued a pattern of aggressively enticing customers, including some with "little or no investment experience." It cites news reports indicating Robinhood has expanded margin lending and sought to persuade customers to deposit their stimulus checks by offering "free cash" for deposits.

Robinhood's conduct since the complaint was filed in December "poses a substantial and continued risk to Massachusetts investors," the complaint said. Massachusetts regulators said Robinhood has failed to report its fractional share trade executions for over a year, "demonstrating its inability to follow the most basic requirements" required of broker-dealers.

In a blog post, Robinhood sharply criticized what it described as "unfounded, politicized allegations and unreasonable demands" from regulators in Massachusetts and warned that revoking its license would block access for millions of customers. "The Massachusetts Securities Division's attempt to prevent Massachusetts residents from choosing how they invest is elitist and against everything we stand for," Robinhood said. "We don't believe our customers are naive as the Massachusetts Securities Division paints them to be." Robinhood fired back by filing a complaint and motion in Massachusetts State Court for a preliminary injunction that would stop the regulatory case against the company. Robinhood is arguing that the regulator's new fiduciary rule "exceeds its authority" under both state and federal law. "By trying to block Robinhood, the division is attempting to bring its residents back in time and reinstate the financial barriers that Robinhood was founded to break down," Robinhood said in the blog post.

An anonymous reader writes: Charles Schwab is suing one of its former customers after the retail brokerage allegedly sent more than $1.2 million to an account of the Louisiana woman and then could not get the money back. Schwab meant to send $82.56 to Kelyn Spadoni's Fidelity Brokerage Services account in February, but a computer glitch caused it to erroneously transfer more than $1.2 million, according to the lawsuit. Schwab tried to get the money back, but repeated calls and texts to Spadoni, who lives in a suburb of New Orleans, were not returned, the brokerage said in the lawsuit. "We are fully cooperating with authorities in an effort to resolve this issue," Schwab said in a statement on Tuesday. Fidelity declined comment. After receiving the money in her account, Spadoni transferred a quarter of the money to another account, after which she bought a house and a car using the funds, Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office spokesman Captain Jason Rivarde said in an interview on Tuesday. "Obviously you are not planning to give the money back if you spent it," he said. When Spadoni signed up with Schwab in January, the agreement she signed included a section that said any overpayment of funds must be returned, said the lawsuit, filed March 30.

Chamber of Progress, a new tech industry group funded by giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google, is announcing its support for a corporate tax increase like the one President Joe Biden proposed to fund his $2 trillion infrastructure plan. From a report: The move sets Chamber of Progress, a new center-left group, apart from other business organizations that have opposed Biden's tax hike, like the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While the group's endorsement does not reflect the individual views of each company that funds it, it does send a signal that the tech industry is open to higher tax rates and supports greater infrastructure investment. Chamber of Progress launched late last month and is an industry coalition focused on a range of economic, social and consumer issues, including creating a social safety net and tackling income inequality. Biden proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% to help fund his American Jobs Plan, which includes infrastructure proposals that span the entire economy. The plan includes money to expand broadband availability, which is key to the success of internet businesses, and other priorities the tech industry has emphasized, like clean energy.

France is offering residents $2,975 to trade in their gas-powered vehicle for an electric bicycle. The Next Web reports: Earlier this week, lawmakers in France approved the measure in a preliminary vote. The French Federation of Bicycle Users claims that if France does go ahead with the scheme, it would be the first nation in the world to give people money for old cars to put towards new electric bicycles, Reuters reports. However, the organization must be leaving out crucial details as to how it reached that conclusion as there have been other similar schemes.

For example, as Martti Tulenheimo, chief specialist at the Finnish Cyclists' Federation points out, Finland has a similar rebate which citizens have used to fund more than 2,000 ebikes, 1,000 new low emission cars, and 100 public transport tickets. Lithuania also offered such a scheme last year. The nation's Environmental Project Management Agency (APVA) offered residents $1,200 if they traded in their old cars. The money could then be used against anything from escooters, to ebikes, to public transport tickets. The scheme was considered a success with more than 8,500 people applying for the grant.

Dogecoin, the virtual currency that originally started as an internet meme more than seven years ago, has surged more than 85% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $0.13. Its market cap is now over $17 billion. CNN reports: The currency has soared more than 2,000% from the start of the year, and has a big fan in Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets about it have on occasion driven up Dogecoin's value. Dogecoin has also enjoyed something of a cult status on Reddit, where a popular group -- not unlike the WallStreetBets group behind GameStop's rally -- decided earlier this year to propel its value "to the moon." Dogecoin soared over 600% in the wake of that push. The latest surge in crypto prices comes as Coinbase became the first major cryptocurrency company to list its shares on a U.S. stock exchange.