Dado Ruvic / Reuters
The rollout of WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, which critics warn will lead to more data sharing with its parent company Facebook, received a blow on May 13 after German regulators temporarily banned the update. The regulators are now said to be seeking a European Union-wide ban by presenting their case to the European Data Protection Board.
WhatsApp users will have noticed a recent intensification of pop-ups nudging them to agree to the app’s new terms of service. The cliff-edge deadline for users to accept these new terms – with WhatsApp announcing that those who failed to do so would lose functionality on the app – had been set for Saturday, May 15. That deadline was recently moved forward by “several weeks”.
China’s digital yuan could be the future of money But what does it mean for global trade? 4 hours ago The digital yuan is a version of the normal Chinese currency deployed on a blockchain. | Martin Bureau / AFP
China is making promising progress with testing its digital yuan currency. It has announced the success of a pilot in Suzhou City, near Shanghai in eastern China, where 181,000 consumers were given ¥55 of free money in digital wallets to spend at participating outlets in the Double Fifth shopping festival between May 1 and 5.
This was part of a bigger test by the People’s Bank of China targeting 500,000 consumers in 11 Chinese regions since April. For those eligible, there is a straightforward app to download which gives them a wallet. Using this to make purchases in thousands of participating stores, they receive discounts.
RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das. | Reuters
Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das on Wednesday announced a Rs 50,000 crore lending programme to help ramp up the health infrastructure as India is battered by a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
The governor said that the RBI will inject liquidity worth Rs 50,000 crore, which will be available for banks to lend to entities like vaccine manufacturers, hospitals, other medical facilities and coronavirus patients. Under the provision, banks will maintain a “Covid loan book” and will be able to borrow money from the central bank at the existing repo rate of 4% for a term of three years. Banks will be able to avail this facility till March 31, 2022.
Running a cryptocurrency business in India is no easy feat.
Just three weeks after the Mumbai-based cryptocurrency exchange WazirX launched in March 2018, the Indian central bank imposed a blanket ban on virtual coins in the country. The Reserve Bank of India’s circular put crypto exchanges in a precarious position. With investors fretting over the ban, trading volumes on exchanges dropped severely and some players in India had to shut shop.
The bootstrapped WazirX also found itself in a tight spot.
But it managed to work its newness to its advantage. Being relatively smaller than other players gave it the ability to tide over the ban.