Arvato
[13] In 1959, the Kommissionshaus Buch und Ton was established to make the production and service infrastructure available for other publishing and printing companies.[14] In the 1970s and 1980s, Bertelsmann founded and bought several other printing and logistics companies in France, Great Britain, Spain, and other European countries.[25] Additionally, the company became responsible for customer support for the launch of Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.[33] Under the leadership of Gunter Thielen, who became CEO of Bertelsmann in 2002, the LP and CD pressing plants of Sonopress and the encyclopedia publishers were integrated with Arvato, too.[35] Arvato restructured its business into divisions for printing, distribution, and logistics services, as well as storage media and information technology.[34] Due to lower volumes of newspapers, magazines, and catalogs, Arvato, Axel Springer, and Gruner + Jahr founded a joint venture for parts of their printing business; it was named Prinovis.[43] Especially in Germany, Arvato won more clients for this division, including publishing houses as well as companies in the high-tech and information technology industry.[34] At the turn of 2007/2008, Hartmut Ostrowski succeeded Gunter Thielen as CEO of Bertelsmann,[44] so Rolf Buch moved to the helm of Arvato.[51] Arvato increased its focus on high-tech, information technology, and e-commerce services, three rapidly growing markets, while printing stagnated.[67][68] Based on sales of 4.8 billion euros in the fiscal year 2015, Arvato was the second-largest division of Bertelsmann after RTL Group.[79] Arvato provides services needed after the sale of third-party products to end users, such as the repair and preparation of devices.[111] Although the company hardly knew more than the name and address of the consumer and had no other adverse information, it gave a low score based on socio-demographic characteristics.[112] In 2013, another public broadcaster, WDR, made similar allegations: The television magazine Markt checked the credit reports of 80 test consumers.2015, the NDR criticized the self-service website for tenant self-disclosures showed sensitive personal information of one entered the name, address, and date of birth.[117] 2016, SWR, another public broadcaster, reported that Arvato Infoscore handles the collection of penalty fares for Deutsche Bahn.[119] In December 2016, SZ-Magazin reported that Arvato employees in the company's Berlin office sustained psychological trauma, including posttraumatic stress disorder, as a result of exposure to videos of torture, murder, bestiality, and child pornography they were required to evaluate as content moderators for Facebook.[125] Inspectors from the Landesamt für Arbeitsschutz, Gesundheitsschutz und technische Sicherheit [de] Berlin (LAGetSi), the city's occupational safety and health department, visited the office in February 2017, but the inspection did not result in formal action.