Wall Street Journal

Google parent Alphabet posted surging profits as advertisers kept swarming to the search giant amid a global debate about internet privacy that threatens to affect its main revenue generator. Alphabet’s earnings also got a multibillion-dollar boost from the company’s stakes in startups including Uber but were tempered by the costliest spending spree in its 14-year history as a public company. Net profit jumped 73% to $9.4 billion in the first quarter, up from $5.4 billion in the same period in 2017, a performance that highlights the firm’s huge lead in the global market for online ads.

In 2016, Google changed its terms of service, allowing it to merge its trove of tracking and advertising data with the personally identifiable information from our Google accounts. Google uses, among other things, our browsing and search history, apps we’ve installed, demographics such as age and gender and, from its own analytics and other sources, where we’ve shopped in the real world. Google says it doesn’t use information from “sensitive categories” such as race, religion, sexual orientation or health.

A closely divided Supreme Court struggled to decide whether internet retailers should have to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence. Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.

The United States and the European Union are aligning rules to help crime-fighters access suspects’ emails, text messages, photos and other data, despite simmering trans-Atlantic tensions.