As recently as last week, Facebook was touting the growth of Free Basics, its Internet.org project designed to give users free curated web access in developing countries, but the app isn’t working out everywhere. As the Outline originally reported and TechCrunch confirmed, the Free Basics program has ended in Myanmar, perhaps Facebook’s most controversial non-Western market […]
“It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee,” WhatsApp co-founder, CEO and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote today. The announcement followed shortly after The Washington Post reported […]
Despite Facebook being under fire for everything pertaining to Cambridge Analytica, the company still hopes to be able to do some good. Today, Facebook is dropping its platform fees pertaining to fundraisers for personal causes. That means Facebook is getting rid of the 4.3 percent platform fee in the u.S. and the 6.2 percent fee […]
Facebook is getting the developing world online, even as the developed world criticizes its privacy practices. Mark Zuckerberg said today on Facebook’s Q1 2018 earnings call that “our Internet.org efforts have helped almost 100 million people get access to the internet who may not have had it otherwise.” That’s up from 40 million in November 2016. […]
Yafit Lev-Aretz Contributor Yafit Lev-Aretz is a Research Fellow at the Information Law Institute, New York University Law School. More posts by this contributor Free choice must be free If it talks like a government and acts like a government, it must be a tech giant The recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica chaos has ignited a fire […]
Facebook has never before made public the guidelines its moderators use to decide whether to remove violence, spam, harassment, self-harm, terrorism, intellectual property theft, and hate speech from social network until now. The company hoped to avoid making it easy to game these rules, but that worry has been overridden by the public’s constant calls for […]
Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that it’s investigating a security research report that shows Facebook user data can be grabbed by third-party JavaScript trackers embedded on websites using Login With Facebook. The exploit lets these trackers gather a user’s data including name, email address, age range, gender, locale, and profile photo depending on what users originally […]
Facebook has another change in the works to respond to the European Union’s beefed up data protection framework — and this one looks intended to shrink its legal liabilities under GDPR, and at scale. Late yesterday Reuters reported on a change incoming to Facebook’s T&Cs that it said will be pushed out next month — meaning […]
While Facebook is still struggling to regain user trust following a data fiasco that ultimately brought Zuckerberg to testify in front of Congress, the company still has plenty to do to ready itself for GDPR and appease EU lawmakers. This includes making sure that everything is up to snuff at its virtual reality company, Oculus […]
Make no mistake: Fresh battle lines are being drawn in the clash between data-mining tech giants and Internet users over people’s right to control their personal information and protect their privacy. An update to European Union data protection rules next month — called the General Data Protection Regulation — is the catalyst for this next chapter […]