By Joseph Pisani, Retail Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --Amazon's push into advertising and cloud computing is paying off, helping the online shopping giant's first quarter profit more than double from a year ago.
The Seattle-based company on Thursday reported net income of $3.56 billion, or $7.09 per share, for the first three months of the year.
That beat expectations of $4.61 per share, according to Zacks Investment Research. In the same time a year ago, it reported net income of $1.63 billion, or $3.27 per share.
Revenue rose 17% to $59.7 billion, which also beat Wall Street expectations.
At its cloud computing business, called Amazon Web Services, revenue soared 41%.
The company doesn't say exactly how much its advertising business makes. Instead it lists it as part of its "other" revenue, which jumped 34% from a year ago.
For the current quarter ending in July, Amazon said it expects revenue in the range of $59.5 billion to $63.5 billion. Analysts expected revenue of $62.53 billion.
Shares of Amazon.com Inc., which are up 27% so far this year, rose 1.6% to $1,933 in after-hours trading Thursday.
Elements of this story were generated by Automated Insights using data from Zacks Investment Research.
Austrian activist wins privacy/targeted advertising case against Meta over personal data on sexual orientation
The European Union's top court said Friday that social media company Meta can't use public information about a user's sexual orientation obtained outside its platforms for personalized advertising under the bloc's strict data privacy rules.
The decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg is a victory for Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, who has been a thorn in the side of Big Tech companies over their compliance with 27-nation bloc's data privacy rules.
The EU court issued its ruling after Austria's supreme court asked for guidance in Schrems' case on how to apply the privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
Schrems had complained that Facebook had processed personal data including information about his sexual orientation to target him with online advertising, even though he had never disclosed on his account that he was gay. The only time he had publicly revealed this fact was during a panel discussion.
"An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all of the personal data obtained for the purposes of targeted advertising, without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data," the court said in a press release summarizing its decision.
Even though Schrems revealed he was gay in the panel discussion, that "does not authorise the operator of an online social network platform to process other data relating to his sexual orientation, obtained, as the case may be, outside that platform, with a view to aggregating and analysing those data, in order to offer him personalised advertising."
Meta said it was awaiting publication of the court's full judgment and that it "takes privacy very seriously."
"Everyone using Facebook has... Read More