The US Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general representing most of the United States’ states and territories are ganging up on Facebook to wrest away control of Instagram and WhatsApp and prevent Facebook from continuing to cement its dominant position in social networking.
Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines recently by suggesting that the tech giants have too much power and need to be broken up. While her premise isn’t entirely wrong, Ben Thompson of Stratechery explains why the proposed solutions are misguided.
In a lengthy blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised to support end-to-end encryption and ephemeral content in the company’s messaging apps. That sounds good, but it doesn’t mean Facebook will stop exploiting all the rest of your data.
In an impressive piece of investigative journalism, Casey Newton of The Verge has published an article describing what it’s like to work as a Facebook content moderator. Short answer: it sounds horrible.
Ever wondered if you could go back to a simpler time without Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft controlling our technological lives? Kashmir Hill of Gizmodo tried cutting each one out in turn and then blocked all five. Here’s how it went.
TechCrunch has revealed that more apps are abusing Apple’s enterprise certificate program, this time to distribute gambling and porn apps outside the App Store.
Disgusted by Facebook’s behavior but feel stuck using it because it’s the only way you communicate with some family members? Try the free tier of the group-messaging system Slack instead. It’s great for families, doesn’t incorporate ads, and guarantees your privacy. A little training may be required.
Apple spent the past week engaged in a dizzying back-and-forth with Facebook and Google over shady research apps trying to make an end-run around App Store rules. Here’s a quick timeline of events and some thoughts on what it all means.
After TechCrunch revealed that Facebook was flagrantly working around an App Store ban, Apple has taken the unusual step of revoking Facebook’s enterprise development certificates.
Facebook has been caught sharing data on its 2.2 billion users with other tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and even Russian search giant Yandex. Apple is in the list too, but not in a way that makes sense.
Apple isn’t possessive of Portrait mode, the iPhone photography feature for creating shots with blurred backgrounds; it allows third parties to integrate the capability into their iOS apps. Google and Facebook are the latest to do it, each in their own way.
Removes the capability to share video files directly to Facebook, replacing it with the option to export a Facebook-compatible video file. (Free, 2.2 GB)
Facebook has acknowledged that attackers took advantage of the platform’s View As feature to breach the security of at least 50 million accounts. If you’re forced to log in again, you might be among the affected users.
Mark Jeftovic, the outspoken CEO of DNS provider easyDNS, has weighed in on the whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal with opinions that are simultaneously harsh and realistic. He starts by equating social media platforms to “The Spew,” a 1994 short story by Neal Stephenson in Wired, and lays out multiple condemnations of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. But then Jeftovic returns to the real question at hand: Should you delete your Facebook page? He recommends keeping business Facebook pages but not relying on them, and he says he’ll keep a personal Facebook page while assuming that anything he posts is completely public and will be used for targeting. But he votes against the mobile Facebook apps, which try their hardest to harvest your contact data.