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The battle over web privacy

Good morning! This Wednesday, debates at the World Wide Web Consortium are happening in plain sight, Apple has plans for buy now pay later, Lalamove might ditch its U.S. IPO plans, and REvil vanished from the dark web.
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The World Wide Web Consortium is usually one of the web's geekiest corners, where developers and engineers from across the web and around the globe collaborate on new technical specifications to ensure websites work no matter what browser you're using or where you're using it.
But over the last year, the W3C has become a key battleground in the war over web privacy. And it's getting pretty ugly.
It all started when Google announced key details of its planto make Chrome more private by killing off third-party cookies and other techniques businesses use to track people around the web.
James Rosewell, who heads up the U.K.-based firm 51Degrees, was the most vocal new entrant. He began filling the W3C's forums with concerns about tech giants' anticompetitive behavior and questions about whether people really want Apple and Google making privacy decisions for them at all.
But not everyone sees it Rosewell's way. For longtime W3C members and privacy advocates, the sudden influx of opposition has been a maddening development, which they say is stalling progress on new privacy features that are long overdue.
These debates and confrontations are happening in plain sight in public GitHub forums and open Zoom meetings. The W3C is perhaps the only place on the internet where you can find Facebook and Apple engineers negotiating and sometimes squabbling over exactly how new features should be built.
Luckily for Facebook, other members of the W3C who are less constrained have also been highly effective in getting their point across, particularly to regulators.
To privacy advocates, this is a sure sign of which side is winning the fight. Soltani said regulators are being sold on the idea that privacy and competition are on a collision course. That, he said, is a false choice. "They could have required everyone to not access that data, Google included, which would have been a net benefit for competition and privacy," Soltani said.
— Issie Lapowsky (email | twitter)
For more, read the full story at Protocol.com.
According to a Nielsen Report, 94% of Chinese tourists said they would pay with their phones if the method becomes more widely adopted overseas; 93% said using that method would likely increase their spending. To meet them where they are, more and more U.S. companies — both here and in China — are embracing Alipay.
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According to a Nielsen Report, 94% of Chinese tourists said they would pay with their phones if the method becomes more widely adopted overseas; 93% said using that method would likely increase their spending. To meet them where they are, more and more U.S. companies — both here and in China — are embracing Alipay.
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Correction: This story was updated to correctly explain the circumstances of Amazon's acquisition of Facebook's satellite internet team. Updated July 14, 2021.
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