Your commercial news round-up: Microsoft, Twitter, automation technology, Tinder

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The key to becoming a successful lawyer is understanding how your law firm and the legal industry operate and make money. As an aspiring lawyer, you can demonstrate your commercial awareness to graduate recruiters throughout the application process.

Read this week’s round-up below to for your commercial news update.

• Microsoft Edge plans to introduce the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) service however it’s been met with criticism from its users. The tech company is under fire for putting its users at risk of getting into debt, with some users going as far as calling it a “shameless cash grab”. This is because the company has added payment provider Zip next to the credit card field at the checkout page as a default payment option. Microsoft isn’t the first fin tech company to introduce the BNPL service. Three months ago, we reported that US PayPal planned to acquire Paidy, a Japanese BNPL firm for $2.7 billion and five months ago Apple partnered with Goldman Sachs to launch a service called ‘Apple Pay Later’. Most, if not all, BNPL services remain unregulated because they fall outside the scope of regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority, which brings to question, how can individuals be shielded from such risks?
   
• Twitter recently updated its privacy policy and will now remove images or videos of people that have been posted without their consent. While this is music to the ears of victims who have had an intimate photo shared without consent, critics argue this rule is too wide and risks stifling the freedom of “expression on the platform”. Twitter has vowed to consider the context of each image posted and must receive notification from the individuals depicted that the image was tweeted without their consent before they will remove the images.
   
• Game streaming platform Twitch has launched an Al tool to prevent prohibited users getting around channel bans. The streaming platform introduced an Al tool called “Suspicious User Detection” which can spot users trying to enter chats from which they have previously been banned due to disruptive behaviour, including hate speech." This launch is part of its aims to fight hate aids against minority or marginalised groups. One month ago, we reported Twitch’s data breach which revealed how much its top streamers earned in the past two years.
   
• Match Group has agreed to pay Tinder’s founders $441 million to settle a lawsuit filed in 2018. The lawsuit started because Tinder’s executives allegedly said Match Group cheated the dating app’s value to avoid paying billions of dollars. The app’s founders claimed they only had a stake worth $600 million when the app was actually worth $13 billion at the time. Match Group is an American tech company that owns numerous global dating companies such as Tinder, Match.com, Hinge and PlentyOfFish. Is it even a LawCareers.Net round-up if someone’s not getting sued?!

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