Flo, Period-Tracking App, Settles Privacy Complaint: Live Updates

Pat Gelsinger, a veteran technology executive and former chief technology officer at Intel, is returning to the big chip maker as chief executive next month, the company announced Wednesday morning.

Mr. Gelsinger will replace Robert Swan, who became Intel’s chief in January 2019, after a stint as chief financial officer.

Intel is under pressure from Third Point, an activist hedge fund, that has acquired a stake in Intel and urged it to rethink its business, including using contract manufacturers instead of spending so heavily on its own factories.

Intel has faltered in its efforts to make the most advanced microprocessors, with shipment schedules slipping.

But in its news release, Intel said it expected to surpass its previous guidance for fourth-quarter 2020 revenue and earnings per share. Those results will be announced on Jan. 21.

Intel is benefiting from a pandemic-fueled surge in sales of personal computers as workers have upgraded their laptops and desktops for working from home. Intel chips are the processing engines of most personal computer — though Apple, for example, is moving away from Intel chips, adopting its own custom-designed microprocessors.

Intel’s stock market performance has lagged behind that of Nvidia, a leader in graphics chips used in computing for artificial intelligence, and Advanced Micro Devices, a longtime smaller rival to Intel in the microprocessor market.

Mr. Gelsinger is chief executive of VMware, a leading maker of data center software. At Intel, which he left in 2009, Mr. Gelsinger rose through the ranks for 30 years.

He is a seasoned executive who is also an engineer, with degrees from Santa Clara University and Stanford University.

Intel shares rose over 8 percent in early morning trading.

The developer behind Flo, a period- and fertility-tracking app used by more than 100 million women, on Wednesday settled federal charges that it had misled users about its data-handling practices by sharing their intimate health details with Facebook and Google.

In its privacy policies, Flo had repeatedly promised users that it would protect private details about their menstruation cycles and fertility, and that the data would be used only to provide services to them, according to a complaint filed by The Federal Trade Commission.

Instead, federal regulators said, Flo shared sensitive health details on millions of users for years with numerous third parties — including Facebook’s and Google’s analytics units, as well as with two mobile analytics services, AppsFlyer and Flurry. The private data included information related to users’ periods, pregnancies and childbirths, the complaint said.

Moreover, Flo did not put limits on how Facebook, Google and other companies could use the women’s health information, federal regulators said, giving the third parties the ability to use the data for advertising and other purposes.

The proposed federal settlement prohibits the app’s developer, Flo Health, from misleading users about its data-handling practices. It also requires Flo to obtain users’ consent before sharing their health details and to obtain an independent review of its privacy practices.

Amid a mixed holiday shopping season for some retailers, and as coronavirus cases surged across the country, Target reported strong sales.

The giant retailer said on Wednesday that its sales in November and December were up 17.2 percent from the same time the previous year, a rise driven both by in-store and online shopping.

Its digital sales were the biggest area of growth, however, more than doubling from the 2019 holiday season. The vast majority of those sales were delivered from Target stores, which analysts say helped the company avoid some of the shipping delays caused by an overload of e-commerce orders. Fulfilling online orders from stores is also more profitable than paying to have items shipped through carriers like FedEx and UPS.

Target’s holiday results are further evidence of the growing gap between large retailers that are emerging from the pandemic stronger and more dominant and others that are failing and not likely to survive.

Google said it would not allow political ads on its platforms until after Inauguration Day because of last week’s violent uprising at the Capitol.

In a letter to advertisers on Wednesday, the company said the temporary suspension covers any ads that reference candidates, the election, its outcome, the upcoming presidential inauguration, the impeachment process, the Capitol riots or planned protests about any of these subjects. There will not be exceptions for news or merchandise advertisers.

The pause will go into effect on Thursday and will extend until at least Jan. 21. Google is the biggest seller of advertising on the internet. In addition to displaying advertising on its own services, such as its search engine and YouTube, it runs a powerhouse ad platform and exchange relied on by other websites and publishers. The policy change was reported earlier by Axios.

Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the riot, Google initially stopped accepting ads that referenced the event.

Google has treated last week’s riot as a “sensitive event,” a designation it usually assigns to natural disasters or mass shootings prohibiting advertising that seeks to take advantage of the tragedy. Google applied this policy for a month after the election and prohibited political ads to help prevent the spread of misinformation through advertising.

After the polls closed on Nov. 3, Facebook has also placed restrictions on political ads in the United States in an attempt to minimize the spread of election-related misinformation.

Airbnb, one of the biggest players in the short-term rental market, will cancel all reservations made in the Washington area next week and block new rentals, the company announced in a statement on Wednesday.

The decision came after the police and elected officials warned Americans not to travel to Washington for the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., citing the risk of the spread of the coronavirus and the threat of another attack similar to last week’s violent siege at the Capitol.

Law enforcement authorities have warned of threats of violence ahead of the inauguration on Jan. 20, and National Guard troops have flooded Washington in response. On Monday, the leaders of the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland issued a joint statement telling potential visitors not to travel to the area, citing both the coronavirus pandemic and the riot.

Already, 16 groups — some of them armed and most of them supporters of President Trump — have registered to stage protests in Washington, though Mayor Muriel Bowser has asked federal officials to cancel any public gathering permits issued.

This week, Airbnb said it would review reservations in the Washington area and cancel those it determined were made by members associated with extremist or hate groups. On Wednesday, it said it would take the broader step of canceling all reservations in response to pleas for people not to attend.

Ms. Bowser and the governors of Virginia and Maryland “have been clear that visitors should not travel to the D.C. metro area for the Inauguration,” the company said in a statement. “Additionally, we are aware of reports emerging yesterday afternoon regarding armed militias and known hate groups that are attempting to travel and disrupt the inauguration.”

Airbnb said it would refund guests for their reservations and reimburse hosts at its own expense.

The company declined to say how many reservations would be canceled, the dates the cancellation policy would be in effect or how far from Washington its policy would apply.

But two Airbnb hosts who contacted the company about the status of existing reservations were told by customer service representatives that Airbnb was canceling reservations that started on or after Jan. 15 and ended by Jan. 21, according to screenshots provided to The New York Times.

Airbnb also said it had banned “numerous individuals” associated with known hate groups or otherwise involved with the mob at the Capitol. It declined to provide more details.

• Dollar General, which has nearly 17,000 locations in the United States, said on Wednesday that it will give four hours of pay to hourly workers who receive a completed Covid-19 vaccination, and additional store labor hours to salaried employees who also do so. Dollar General is one of the first major employers to announce such incentives. It said that it did “not want our employees to have to choose between receiving a vaccine or coming to work.”

• Visa and the financial technology start-up Plaid abandoned their $5.3 billion merger on Tuesday, citing a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit. The agreement between Visa and Plaid, a service that allows companies and apps to securely share customer data, was challenged in November by Justice Department officials who said the credit card giant was trying to eliminate a “nascent threat” to its online payments business. The leaders of Visa and Plaid said they disagreed with the Justice Department’s stance but decided not to fight the lawsuit.

• Boeing’s outstanding plane orders shrank by 500 in 2020, though its fortunes began to shift at the end of the year after the Federal Aviation Administration allowed the aircraft maker’s troubled 737 Max to fly again after a 20-month grounding. The company said Tuesday that it had received orders for 90 new planes in December, most of which were part of a previously announced deal with the European airline Ryanair. The company also sold eight 777 freighters to DHL, the shipping company. Those orders were offset by 107 cancellations in the month.

• Financial markets in the U.S. ticked up slightly, after retreating from record highs earlier this week.

• The S&P 500 was up 0.4 percent in midday trading. In Europe, the FTSE 100 was down slightly, while the Stoxx Europe 600 was slightly higher.

• Energy prices broke their streak of gains, with futures on West Texas Intermediate crude down nearly half a percent. Futures on the U.S. crude benchmark had risen for seven straight days, the longest streak in two years, after Saudi Arabia said last week it would cut production.

• The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds fell for a second consecutive day to 1.09 percent. Last week, the yield climbed above 1 percent for the first time since March. On Tuesday, two Federal Reserve policymakers said that it was too soon to consider when the central bank would taper its bond-buying program, saying any pullback in monetary stimulus didn’t need to be considered while the pandemic was still raging.

• U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday moved toward impeaching President Trump, the United States set another record for the number of deaths in a single day from the coronavirus, and other countries around the world strengthened restrictions as they rush to vaccinate as many people as possible.