Instagram owner Meta has been fined €405m (£349m) by the Irish data watchdog for letting teenagers set up accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses. The Data Protection Commission confirmed the penalty after a two-year investigation into potential breaches of the European Union’s general data protection regulation (GDPR). Instagram had allowed users […]
Half of UK SME’s have had an application for a loan rejected in the past year with one in ten owners remortgaging their homes to keep trading, new research suggests. A survey of UK business owners and managers found a 14 per cent increase in those saying they had been rejected for government loans since […]
Oxford University’s start-up incubator, opened by the Apple chief executive Tim Cook, has closed its doors to students after only five years and even though it received £3.2 million in launch funding. High-profile donors to the centre, called the Oxford Foundry, included Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, who gave £1 million, as well as Biz […]
The resilience of Britain’s technology infrastructure is under scrutiny because of fears of winter blackouts and the impact of the soaring cost of energy. Data centre operators have asked for short-term priority for energy use should electricity be restricted, to ensure that critical services, from banking to public services, can keep running. They will present […]
Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused civil servants of using flexible working to skive off as he demands an audit of the practice across Whitehall. In one of his last acts as government efficiencies minister before a new prime minister takes office, Rees-Mogg has warned departments against the “overuse” of flexi-time and called for detailed lists of […]
Energy UK has called for nuclear plants and electricity generators to ditch their lucrative renewable obligation certificates (ROC) in favour of long-term deals with lower returns. The industry body is backing proposals first outlined by the UK Energy Research Centre for a voluntary shift from ROC’s to an agreement mirroring the newer contracts for difference […]
OnlyFans has paid out more than $500m (£433m) to its reclusive owner in the last two years, as the British-based subscriber platform synonymous with pornography reported record profits. Leonid Radvinsky, the site’s Ukrainian-American 40-year-old owner, is the sole shareholder in a business that has seen its profits boom, as users spent $4.8bn on the site […]
A company linked to the Conservative peer Michelle Mone that was awarded £203m worth of government PPE contracts during the pandemic has been issued with a winding up petition, apparently for unpaid taxes. PPE Medpro Ltd was awarded two contracts via the government’s “VIP lane” after Lady Mone approached Michael Gove in May 2020 with […]
Visits to the high street remained 13.6 per cent below pre-pandemic levels last month as hot weather and rail strikes took their toll. However, August did represent an improvement of 2.3 percentage points from July, according to the British Retail Consortium, which compiled the data. The industry body hailed a “modest” recovery from pandemic lows. […]
More than 1.7 million households plan to stop their energy direct debits next month when the latest price rise comes into effect, research published today suggests. The first study of the likely extent of non-payment found 6 per cent of people intend to cancel monthly payments in October. When extrapolated nationally this equates to 3.16 […]