The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations has added alternative data usage to its list of examination priorities for 2020.

Clickstream data providers are assessing the commercial viability of their datasets after news broke last week that Avast would stop providing user web-browsing data to its subsidiary Jumpshot.

LinkedIn is making good on its promise to fight back against hiQ Labs in the notorious web-scraping case that has gripped the alternative data community for the last two years.

Avast has indicated that it intends to stop providing user data to Jumpshot and will begin winding down its subsidiary’s operations effective immediately, according to a statement released today by Ondrej Vlcek, Avast’s CEO.

Fasanara Capital, a London-based hedge fund with nearly EUR 1bn of assets under management, has opened its machine learning-driven fund to outside investors following a three-year proprietary trading period.

Jeremy Baksht, formerly the global head of alternative data at Bloomberg L.P., has joined retail consultant Ascential as the head of a new division dedicated to selling the firm’s digital economy data to hedge funds and private equity firms.

Amplity Health, a pharmaceutical commercialisation conglomerate, has acquired RealHealthData, a healthcare data provider that gathers information from electronic medical records within the US.

Consumer transactional data provider Yodlee has come under fire from US lawmakers for collecting the financial transaction data of American consumers and selling it to hedge funds and other investors.

Graham Giller, former head of primary research for Deutsche Bank, has launched a research company/family office focused on similar “nowcasting” strategies to those that he developed during his time at the bank.

Visa announced Monday that it would acquire Plaid, a technology provider that develops back-end infrastructure for fintech firms, for USD 5.3bn. The transaction, which will be subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close within three to s...