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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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Instagram prototyping feature that would share your detailed location data with Facebook

TechCrunch reports today that Facebook is testing a new privacy setting that would share location history from Instagram with Facebook. This news comes on the heels of the Instagram cofounders leaving the company, with Facebook’s former VP of News Feed being named Head of Instagram. The Instagram location sharing is still in the testing phase, but Facebook did not rule out a full launch.


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Facebook hopes to revive its ‘Nearby Friends’ location sharing feature w/ new Snapchat-like interface

Facebook’s efforts to compete head-on with Snapchat have been incredibly clear thanks to features like Stories. Now, the company is planning to revive its unpopular ‘Nearby Friends’ feature with a new Snapchat-like interface. While the Facebook location sharing feature has never been too popular, the company hopes this redesign could spur new interest.


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Instagram co-founders leave Facebook, hint that they will create an all-new app

Update: Facebook shares have fallen 2% in pre-market trading, which would wipe $11B from the company’s market cap if unchanged by the time the market opens.

Instagram’s two founders, who have continued work on the app since it was acquired by Facebook six years ago, have announced that they are leaving Facebook to work on something new …


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Tech regulation is coming, says vice-chair of Senate Intelligence Committee

The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has suggested that regulation of the tech industry is now inevitable.

Sen. Mark Warner’s remarks were made during and after the testimony of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to the committee regarding their failure to prevent state-sponsored interference in the 2016 presidential election and their planned countermeasures in the run-up to the midterms …


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Senate Intelligence Committee to grill Facebook and Twitter on election interference countermeasures

Update: Jack Dorsey is live-tweeting his opening statement as he gives it …

Facebook’s COO and Twitter’s CEO will be appearing before Congress today to defend their failure to prevent Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and to explain what they are doing to prevent state-sponsored interference in the November midterms.

Google was also asked to appear, but it seems unlikely to do so …


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Facebook deletes all statuses originally cross-posted from Twitter [U: restored]

twitter quality filter

Update: Affected posts have now been restored. See end of post for explanation.

Facebook has seemingly removed all tweets that users had published to their Facebook profile through cross-posting from Twitter. As first noticed by TechCrunch, Facebook’s removal of the shared tweets comes following the deprecation of an API that blocked the cross-posting feature from working.


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At Apple’s request, Facebook is removing its spyware-like Onavo VPN app from the App Store

Update: In a statement to TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, Apple says it is committed to protecting user privacy:

“We work hard to protect user privacy and data security throughout the Apple ecosystem. With the latest update to our guidelines, we made it explicitly clear that apps should not collect information about which other apps are installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing and must make it clear what user data will be collected and how it will be used.”

Facebook is removing its controversial and spyware-like Onavo Protect application from the App Store. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Apple has ruled the app as being in violation of its data-collection policies.


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Comment: Facebook has, ironically, raised the privacy stakes for Apple

wireless carriers selling location data

Apple has long sought to protect the personal data of its customers, but that reputation was probably most cemented in the minds of the public by the way the company stood up to the FBI. Refusing to compromise its stance on iOS security even in the face of a legal demand by the highest federal law enforcement agency in the land sent an extremely strong message.

But Bloomberg yesterday ran a piece questioning Apple’s commitment to privacy …


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