Meta

Update, 6:39 p.m. ET: It looks like the issue has been resolved, as outage reports on X and Downdetector are now trending downward. The original post follows below.

As multiple users report that Facebook is currently down, Downdetector data suggests the outage may also be affecting other platforms owned by the company. Here are the details.

A new report says that video feeds from Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses are sent for review by human data annotators in Kenya, and that the footage includes sensitive content that is supposed to be excluded.

Whistleblowers says that the video seen by third-party contractors used by Meta includes everything from people having sex to bank cards …

Instagram has said that it will begin notifying parents if their teenage child “repeatedly” searches for content related to self-harm or suicide.

The announcement follows Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in court in response to claims that Instagram content had led to self-harm by children …

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified this week in what’s viewed as a landmark court case around the mental health impact of social media. As part of that testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that he reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook to talk about the “wellbeing of teens and kids.”

A new report suggests that a Meta smartwatch will launch at some point this year, but it likely won’t compete with the Apple Watch.

Based on previous comments by the company, it may serve as more of an accessory to a future Meta smart glasses product …

Meta has revealed that it plans to test paid subscriptions to Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook – with multiple options apparently on the cards.

The company has so far only provided specifics on the paywalled features for Instagram, with no details yet available about its other services …

Update, 7:11 p.m. ET: A Meta representative reached out to 9to5Mac and provided the following statement:

“We are grateful to the University of Vienna researchers for their responsible partnership and diligence under our Bug Bounty program. This collaboration successfully identified a novel enumeration technique that surpassed our intended limits, allowing the researchers to scrape basic publicly available information. We had already been working on industry-leading anti-scraping systems, and this study was instrumental in stress-testing and confirming the immediate efficacy of these new defenses. Importantly, the researchers have securely deleted the data collected as part of the study, and we have found no evidence of malicious actors abusing this vector. As a reminder, user messages remained private and secure thanks to WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption, and no non-public data was accessible to the researchers.” 

A massive WhatsApp security flaw exposed the phone number of almost every user on the planet – despite the fact that parent company Meta had been alerted to the vulnerability way back in 2017.

Security researchers were able to use what they described as a “simple” exploit to extract a total of 3.5 billion phone numbers from the messaging service …

The European Union has found that both Meta and TikTok failed to properly protect children, including making it difficult to report the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in their apps.

Separately, Meta has faced a setback in its defense of lawsuits filed by multiple US states, accusing the company of deliberately making its apps addictive despite knowing they were harmful to teenagers …

A tactic used by a growing number of scammers is to impersonate help centres in order to trick victims into sharing their screens via WhatsApp. By doing so, they can obtain sensitive information like bank account details and verification codes.

Meta says WhatsApp will now intervene when someone attempts to use screen sharing with an unknown contact during a video call. The company will also proactively flag suspicious-looking chats in Facebook Messenger …

Do you use Facebook Messenger on the Mac? Soon, your app’s going to stop working. Meta has announced that its Messenger app for Mac is being killed off entirely.

Meta just announced a big change coming to its privacy policy in a couple months. It’s going to start using data from your chats with AI products to sell ads hyper-targeted to you. And there’s no way to opt out.

Apple is reportedly launching its own AI smart glasses next year, per a Bloomberg report. While Apple is very much so late to the category, I do think there are a number of great value adds Apple could bring to the table – which I’ll be outlining here.

A former Meta product manager has claimed that the social network circumvented Apple’s privacy protections, as well as cheating advertisers, and fired him when he repeatedly raised the issue internally.

Meta is said to have found ways to identify Apple users even after they refused consent for app tracking, in order to avoid an estimated $10 billion loss of revenue …

One of the downsides of tech giants creating Silicon Valley was the affordable housing crisis it spurred. That has made it next to impossible for those on typical salaries to rent or buy in the area.

Apple was one of a number of tech companies which pledged to help out back in 2019, and so far has delivered more than most …