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Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018

Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018. It also averages 1.52 billion daily active users as of December 2018.

Facebook was launched in February of 2004 (as The Facebook) for college students and then rapidly grew as it opened the service to more than those with a .edu email address. It was the subject of the 2010 movie called “The Social Network“.

In 2012, the social media giant offered its IPO and Facebook earned the title of the fastest company to grow to $250 billion market capitalization in the S&P 500.

In recent years, the company has been at the center of attention related to its role in the Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Since then, it’s been a continual stream of negative news for the company. They recently had all of their enterprise certificates for iOS revoked after it was discovered they had repackaged Onavo VPN as a ‘Research’ app and were paying teens $20/month to sneakily sideload it.

In early 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a “privacy shift” for the company. He outlined a detailed vision for the future of the social media platform, specifically its messaging services. Notably, in contrast to how the company operates today, he says the future of the platform will be privacy-focused with features like end-to-end encryption, interoperability between its various apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reducing how long it holds data, secure storage of personal data, and more.

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France works on Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) tax, rest of Europe watches

France pushes ahead with plans for GAFA tax

France is pushing ahead on its own plans for a so-called GAFA tax – one that would impose a 3% tax on tech companies with worldwide revenues of more than €750M ($842M). The tax is named after four of the target companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.

Other European countries are in discussions about doing the same across the EU, but have not yet reached agreement on how best to proceed …


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UK’s tough new plans on harmful content could see Apple, Google, others, fined 4% of turnover

Failing to act on 'harmful content' could see tech giants face huge fines

The UK wants to get tough on ‘harmful content’ within apps, on social networks and on websites – and is consulting on new legislation which could see companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter fined up to 4% of their worldwide turnover if they don’t act quickly to remove it.

Government minister Jeremy Wright said that “the era of self-regulation for online companies is over” …


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Mark Zuckerberg joins Tim Cook in calling for GDPR-like privacy regulation in the US

tim cook zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg has published an opinion piece in The Washington Post outlining four ways he thinks new regulation could benefit the Internet. Zuckerberg specifically points to harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability. Zuckerberg calls for expanded privacy regulation, echoing similar statements from Tim Cook.


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Change your Facebook and Instagram password, company admits millions of passcodes were viewable by employees

Uh-oh, says Facebook, it turns out millions of user passcodes were stored in plaint text on the social network’s servers. Facebook disclosed the mistake that risked exposing the passwords of Facebook and Instagram users in a new blog post called Keeping Passwords Secure — presumably the irony is not intentional.


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Telegram benefits from what is said to be Facebook’s most severe global outage

Facebook outage the most severe one ever

The BBC suggests that yesterday’s Facebook outage – which also impacted Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram – was the most severe one ever experienced by the company.

Facebook appears to be recovering from a more than 14-hour disruption to all of its products that left them mostly inaccessible across the world. The company’s main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram were all affected […]

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150m users – compared with around 2.3bn monthly users today.

There have been conflicting reports on the reason for the failure …


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Mark Zuckerberg pushing encrypted Messenger and ephemeral Stories to brand Facebook ‘privacy’

Facebook earnings

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, outlined a detailed vision for the future of the social media platform today, specifically its messaging services. Notably, in contrast to how the company operates today, he says the future of the platform will be privacy-focused with features like end-to-end encryption, interoperability between its various apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reducing how long it holds data, secure storage of personal data, and more.


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Second problem found with Facebook 2FA security: phone numbers are searchable

Second problem with Facebook 2FA identified

We always recommend that people take advantage of two-factor authentication (2FA) to protect online accounts, but a second problem with Facebook 2FA has now been discovered.

The company last year admitted that it used 2FA phone numbers for ad targeting, and it has now been revealed that it also makes your phone number searchable – and you cannot fully opt out …


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Investigation into at least 11 iOS apps sending sensitive data to Facebook, inc sexual activity

11 popular apps sending sensitive data to facebook

A New York regulator has written to Facebook and the developers behind at least 11 popular iPhone apps found to be sending sensitive data to Facebook, to demand an explanation.

This data included things like weight, BMI, menstrual cycles, alcohol consumption, food consumption, heart-rate, blood pressure and calories burned during exercise – including in one case the category ‘sexual activity’ …


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Facebook

Facebook still planning ‘clear history’ feature to address user privacy concerns

Facebook has shared today that its previously announced “clear history” feature is set to be released sometime this year. It will allow users to see all the apps and websites they’ve interacted with and delete the data. Facebook will also begin allowing users to stop the platform from recording such data moving forward.


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Popular apps caught secretly sending health data and more to Facebook, should Apple intervene?

Facebook privacy apps

A new investigative report from The Wall Street Journal today looks into the controversial practice of popular third-party iOS and Android apps sending very personal user data to Facebook. In some cases, this happened immediately after an app recorded new data, even if the user wasn’t logged into Facebook or wasn’t a Facebook user at all. Notably, the report highlights that Apple and Google don’t require apps to divulge all the partners that user data is shared with.


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