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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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Facebook wants to partner w/ banks for new Messenger features, but it promises to protect your data

A pair of reports emerged today highlighting how Facebook does (and does not) want to work with and share user data with banks. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Facebook’s broad-reaching plans to work with major banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo, but TechCrunch disputes the details of that report…


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Facebook might not spy on you now, but it has a patent for the ability

It’s not uncommon for people to think that Facebook is spying on their conversations when online ads appear to advertise something they discussed offline. The reality is often simply coincidence or more often based on cookies when searching online for something related.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook doesn’t know how to spy on users — even if the company swears it won’t use the technology…


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Facebook testing new feature to help you track the time you spend in its app

facebook live

Amid a growing push towards improved digital health, Facebook is seemingly testing a new tool that would show users how long they spend on the platform per day. As reported by TechCrunch, the “Your Time on Facebook” feature was discovered in an unreleased version of the Facebook mobile app, with the company confirming the feature’s development…


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Snapchat confirms four APIs, allowing use of Bitmoji avatar in other apps and more

It was reported last month that Snapchat was working on a number of APIs to allow integrations with third-party apps, known as Snap Kit, and the company has now confirmed this – with four of them now available.

Conscious of how Facebook ran into trouble granting data access to third-party apps, however, it is promising tight controls …


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Facebook flaw changed millions of users’ posts from private to public

Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta lay

Update: Facebook has shared more details about the bug, including that the flaw was live from May 18-27. Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer also gave an updated statement.

“We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before – and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake” – Erin Egan, Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook.

In the latest installment of Facebook’s security and privacy issues, the company is letting up to 14 million users know if their posts were accidentally changed from private to public due to a bug last month.


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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg failed to answer 40+ questions in yesterday’s hearing

facebook FTC deal

With the European Parliament having passed some extremely tough privacy legislation, and many members being well-versed in the issues as they relate to tech companies, there were high hopes for yesterday’s grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Tough and pertinent questions were indeed asked, far more so than in Congress – but Zuckerberg failed to answer more than 40 of them …


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