Meta earns as much as $7 billion annually from high-risk scam ads—according to a Reuters exposé. Rather than spend $2 billion on universal verification to prevent fraud, internal documents reveal the company developed a “playbook” to deflect regulators.
In keeping with our desire to model the behavior we want to see in the world, we have stopped posting TidBITS to X/Twitter and Facebook in protest against the harm they cause to civil society. Many other channels remain available, including Bluesky and Mastodon.
Apple has re-released the recent Rapid Security Responses for its flagship operating systems to plug a WebKit vulnerability that’s being exploited without causing website loading issues. Install the updates as soon as feasible.
If you're experiencing website loading issues—notably with Facebook and Instagram—after installing the recent Rapid Security Responses, you may want to remove them until Apple fixes the problem and releases new ones.
After Twitter put a $42,000-per-month API fee for enterprises into effect, the WordPress Jetpack service dropped its Twitter connections, ending automatic posting of TidBITS articles on Twitter. Curious if he could sort out a free replacement, Adam Engst dug around and pieced one together.
Meta’s Instagram and Facebook iOS apps open external links in an in-app browser instead of Safari, enabling them to inject custom JavaScript code into every website you visit using the in-app browser.
If you use Brave or Firefox to protect your privacy from the social media sausage machine, note that Facebook has just changed its URL scheme to prevent privacy tools from stripping URL tracking parameters.
On 4 October 2021, Facebook disappeared from the Internet for most of the day. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare explains how it happened, even if we don’t know exactly why.
Apple recently unveiled an iPad camera feature called Center Stage that keeps one or more people within the frame during video chats even when they move around. Julio Ojeda-Zapata gave Center Stage a try and compared it to smart displays from Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
Though Apple’s App Tracking Transparency has thwarted some of Facebook’s tracking efforts, the social media company can (and will, of course) still extract personal information through photos you upload. Here’s how to prevent such antisocial behavior.
Lauren Goode canceled her wedding in 2019 but is still being reminded of it by online algorithms. This seemingly modern-day problem was somewhat foreseeable, but it’s also not entirely new.
A 2019 data breach exposed the personal information of 533 million Facebook users. Here are a couple of tools you can use to see if you’ve been compromised.
Mike Masnick of TechDirt explains why everyone is mad at Facebook for cutting off links to Australian news sites, even though Australian publishers accused Facebook of taking advantage of them by linking to them.
Apple has dedicated a day to celebrate some of its new privacy features. Meanwhile, Facebook is planning to sue over them.
Privacy-focused messenging app Signal has been exploding in popularity, and it’s a surprisingly competent replacement for WhatsApp for those Apple users who have been forced to use the Facebook-owned messaging service for cross-platform communications.