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Innula Zenovka

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From The Guardian:/Revealed: Facebook let children run up huge bills to boost revenues

Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit that had accused it of allowing children to run up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards as part of a concerted effort to maximise revenues.

Court documents obtained by the US-based Center for Investigative Reporting, initially sealed as part of a lawsuit filed in 2012, revealed Facebook staffers discussing what to do with the “whales”, as they referred to the high-spending children, before deciding to refuse refunds.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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Innula Zenovka: unfortunately this is by far means nothing new. When there was still Jamba around selling ring tones in 2004 they exactly used the same strategy to generate revenue.

And just in case you don't remember Jamba - which was a big thing in Europe back then:

 
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Wtf is wrong with this company, let me count the ways...

Facebook has been paying teens $20 a month for total access to their phone activity
Facebook has run a program to collect intimate user data from paid volunteers for the past three years, according to a new report. TechCrunch reported that the company has been paying people ages 13 to 25 as much as $20 month in exchange for installing an app called Facebook Research on iOS or Android, which monitors their phone and web activity and sends it back to Facebook. The company confirmed the existence of the research program to TechCrunch.

[...]

The Research app requires that users install a custom root certificate, which gives Facebook the ability to see users’ private messages, emails, web searches, and browsing activity. It also asks users to take screenshots of their Amazon order history and send it back to Facebook.
 

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In case you thought Google would never do something as creepy as Facebook...

Google also monitored iPhone usage with a private app
Google distributed a private app that monitored how people use their iPhones, in much the same way that Facebook did — and got in trouble for. Google’s app, reported today by TechCrunch, rewards users with gift cards for letting Google collect information on their internet usage. The app has since been disabled.

The app relied on Apple’s enterprise program, which allows for the distribution of internal apps within a company. That could be a problem: Apple says these apps should only be used by a company’s employees, and companies that violate the policy could be banned, having all their internal apps disabled. That’s exactly what happened to Facebook today.
Google said it was a mistake that it used Apple's enterprise program and they've disabled it on iOS devices. Meanwhile, it still exists as an Android app. No mistake there.
 
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Chalice Yao

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Despite Facebook's recent scandals, such as the site's biggest data breach, the social media company managed to beat Wall Street's estimates in its Q4 earnings. "Facebook hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 percent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate," reports TechCrunch. "Facebook climbed to 1.52 billion daily active users from 1.49 billion last quarter for a 2 percent growth rate that dwarfed last quarter's 1.36 percent." From the report: Facebook earned $16.91 billion off all those users with a $2.38 GAAP earnings per share. Those numbers handily beat Wall Street's expectations of $16.39 billion in revenue and $2.18 GAAP earnings per share, plus 2.32 billion monthly and 1.51 billion daily active users. Facebook's daily to monthly user ratio, or stickiness, held firm at 66 percent where it's stayed for years, showing those still on Facebook aren't using it much less. Facebook shares had closed today at $150.42 but shot up over 9 percent following the record revenue and profit announcements to hover around $162. A big 30 percent year-over-year boost in average revenue per user in North America fueled those gains. Yet that's still way down from $186 where it was a year ago and a peak of $217 in July.
Oh well. I am sure Facebook totally learned their lession from all those scandals. Right?

....right?
 
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Kara Spengler

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I saw that story. It is weird because that is not news. Most Android phones come with pre installed apps that can be disabled but can't be removed. I don't remember if Facebook is one of them.
I am pretty sure it is as I do not remember installing it.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Facebook’s controversial factchecking program has lost one of its major US partners. The news website Snopes.com announced on Friday it was cutting ties with the social network.

The departure of Snopes, which has collaborated with Facebook for two years to debunk misinformation on the platform, doesn’t come as a surprise. Numerous journalists working for Facebook’s factchecking initiative have said the partnership was failing to have an impact.

Snopes, which was paid by Facebook, announced in a short post that it had been evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party factchecking services. “We want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication and staff,” it said.
Snopes quits Facebook's factchecking program amid questions over its impact
 

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Facebook uses its apps to track users it thinks could threaten employees and offices
In early 2018, a Facebook user made a public threat on the social network against one of the company's offices in Europe.

Facebook picked up the threat, pulled the user's data and determined he was in the same country as the office he was targeting. The company informed the authorities about the threat and directed its security officers to be on the lookout for the user.

[...]

The incident is representative of the steps Facebook takes to keep its offices, executives and employees protected, according to more than a dozen former Facebook employees who spoke with CNBC. The company mines its social network for threatening comments, and in some cases uses its products to track the location of people it believes present a credible threat.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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The Guardian's headline writer wants shooting for this -- Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by fake news report should be something like "Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by inquiry into fake news" -- but anyway:
Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”.

The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.

“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins.
The full report is here: Disinformation and 'fake news': Final Report - Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee - House of Commons and a .pdf is here.
 

Dakota Tebaldi

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Hey guess what - your completely-unrelated-to-Facebook phone apps are still sending your private data to Facebook behind your back.

Facebook is under scrutiny from Washington and European regulators for how it treats the information of users and nonusers alike. It has been fined for allowing now defunct political-data firm Cambridge Analytica illicit access to users’ data and has drawn criticism for giving companies special access to user records well after it said it had walled off that information.

In the case of apps, the Journal’s testing showed that Facebook software collects data from many apps even if no Facebook account is used to log in and if the end user isn’t a Facebook member.

Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which operate the two dominant app stores, don’t require apps to disclose all the partners with whom data is shared.

Users can decide not to grant permission for an app to access certain types of information, such as their contacts or locations. But these permissions generally don’t apply to the information users supply directly to apps, which is sometimes the most personal.

In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.

Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.

Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp , sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.

None of those apps provided users any apparent way to stop that information from being sent to Facebook.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws

Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebookdocuments has revealed.

The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.
 

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Facebook proves Elizabeth Warren’s point by deleting her ads about breaking up Facebook
Today, Facebook removed a number of ads placed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, according to Politico. The ads target tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook and were placed after Warren announced last week that she would work to break up the firms by reversing large acquisitions, if elected president in 2020.

Shortly after reports surfaced, Facebook told Politico that it would be restoring the ads that it had taken down. “We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo. In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads[...]
The restored ads had no changes to text or logo use. :poop:
 
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Facebook has had a policy that you can't have facebook logos in ads on facebook forever. This doesn't seem unreasonable, because you know the kinds of people who place ads on facebook would come up with all kinds of ways to abuse that.

They left the ads that didn't contain facebook logos. And when it came up, they reinstated them, even though they still violated the policy because they didn't want to get into a fight with an 800 pound gorilla.

At the worst it's some technical minion applying the rules as written because random technical minions are not strategic geniuses.

Much as I hate to defend Facebook, this one's a nothingburger.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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AirAsia CEO quits Facebook over New Zealand massacre

"The amount of hate that goes on in social media sometimes outweighs the good," he said in a tweet Sunday. "Facebook could have done more to stop some of this."

For at least 17 minutes on Friday, a suspected terrorist streamed live video of a mass murder at a mosque in New Zealand. New Zealand police alerted Facebook to the livestream, and Facebook said it quickly removed the shooter's account and the video. Facebook also said it was removing praise or support for the shooting "as soon as we're aware."

But that was not enough for Fernandes, CEO of the Malaysian airline company. Although Fernandes said he was a "social media fan," the livestream caused him to leave Facebook.

"It is a great platform to communicate," he tweeted after canceling his Facebook account. "Strong engagement and very useful but New Zealand was too much for me to take along with all the other issues."
 
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The UpGuard Cyber Risk team can now report that two more third-party developed Facebook app datasets have been found exposed to the public internet. One, originating from the Mexico-based media company Cultura Colectiva, weighs in at 146 gigabytes and contains over 540 million records detailing comments, likes, reactions, account names, FB IDs and more. This same type of collection, in similarly concentrated form, has been cause for concern in the recent past, given the potential uses of such data.

A separate backup from a Facebook-integrated app titled “At the Pool” was also found exposed to the public internet via an Amazon S3 bucket. This database backup contained columns for fk_user_id, fb_user, fb_friends, fb_likes, fb_music, fb_movies, fb_books, fb_photos, fb_events, fb_groups, fb+checkins, fb_interests, password, and more. The passwords are presumably for the “At the Pool” app rather than for the user’s Facebook account, but would put users at risk who have reused the same password across accounts.