Facebook continues to face fallout over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed how user data was stealthily obtained by way of quizzes and then appropriated for other purposes, such as targeted political advertising. Today, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced that it would be issuing the social network with its maximum fine, £500,000 ($662,000) […]
Facebook is giving advertisers new ways to show off their products, including with augmented reality. At its F8 developer conference earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was working with businesses to use AR to show off products in Messenger. Now a similar experience will start appearing in the News Feed, with a select group […]
Ready to scrounge for Likes on your Stories too? Facebook Stories can feel like a ghost town even though it has 150 million daily users. So Facebook is trying to get more people who view your ephemeral content on its Snapchat clone to speak up so you keep posting. Today Facebook is bringing its Like, Haha, […]
Messaging app firm Line has confirmed it will launch a cryptocurrency exchange called BitBox next month. The company said back in January that it planned to enter the crypto space with an exchange, but today it said that the BitBox service won’t be available for users in the U.S. and Japan — that’s presumably down […]
Eighteen months since its initial release, Oculus is delivering some major updates to its Medium “immersive sculpting tool” in a free 2.0 update that’s being released today. The artistic tool is one of the company’s few first-party apps on the PC Rift platform. Today’s updates focus primarily on performance bumps, a UI revamp and some […]
Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.’s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country. TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup […]
Following the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal and the more recent discovery of a Facebook app that had been leaking data on 120 million users, Facebook is today announcing a number of API changes aimed at better protecting user information. The changes will impact multiple developer-facing APIs, including those used to create social experiences on the […]
If you block someone on Facebook, you probably want them to… you know, stay blocked. At least until you say otherwise. Facebook has just disclosed that around 800,000 users were impacted by a bug that silently unblocked “some” people they had blocked. The bug was live from May 29 until June 5, the company says. […]
Facebook announced this morning that the London-based team at Bloomsbury AI will be joining the company. My colleague Steve O’Hear broke the news about the acquisition yesterday, reporting that Facebook would deploy the team and technology to assist in its efforts to fight fake news and address other content issues. In fact, Bloomsbury AI co-founder […]
Instagram is turning the Time Well Spent philosophy into features to help users avoid endless scrolling and distraction by notifications. Today, Instagram is rolling out its “You’re All Caught – You’ve seen all new posts from the past 2 days” warning in the feed which TechCrunch broke the news about in May. Past that notice […]