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 …
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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 …
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Today isn’t a great day for users of Meta apps. Mark Zuckerberg has told us to expect a “huge corpus” of AI content in Facebook and Instagram, while the company’s CFO Susan Li has said that ads in Threads are now running globally and that video ads are on the way …
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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 …
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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 …
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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.
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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.
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Today brings a little flurry of social media app news, including better child protection measures in Meta’s AI chatbot; an expansion of ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram; and Snapchat starting to charge storage fees for higher volumes of Memories …
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Following a very well-timed video leak earlier this week, Meta announced tonight its new lineup of smart glasses, including the Meta Ray-Ban Display. Here are the details.
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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.
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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 …
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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 …
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Meta is apparently experiencing some capacity of server issues today.
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EssilorLuxottica, Meta’s partner in the smart glasses market and owner of brands such as Ray-Ban and Oakley, just reported stronger-than-expected quarterly revenue, driven in part by rising demand for the Ray-Ban Meta. Here’s the breakdown.
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Apple at one time considered adding a camera to the Apple Watch, but it looks like Meta may get there first. A new report suggests the company may unveil the upcoming wearable at its September event.
A Meta smartwatch with a camera was spotted in development back in 2021, but was said to have been put on pause the following year. However, a new supply-chain report says the project was revived and is now close to launch …
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Meta said that it has removed 135,000 Instagram accounts for “sexualizing children,” and has launched new protections for teenage users.
A further half a million Instagram and Facebook accounts were removed by the platform when they were found to be linked to the offending profiles …
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Just days after hiring Ruoming Pang, who had led Apple’s foundation model efforts, Meta is reuniting him with two former colleagues from Cupertino.
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Earlier this week, Ruoming Pang, the executive who until recently led Apple’s AI models team, left the company to join Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL. Now, as reported by Bloomberg, we know just what it took to lure him away.
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Meta’s renewed push into AI is throwing the entire market off-balance, and Apple is particularly exposed. With morale arguably at an all-time low inside Cupertino’s AI teams, Zuckerberg’s multimillion-dollar check-cutting spree may have already pulled at least one top researcher out of Apple Park. And there may be more to come.
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Meta’s smart glasses experiment is moving into its next phase. After scoring a surprise hit with its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, the company is now teaming up with Oakley for a more rugged, sport-focused lineup and good tech upgrades. Here’s when to get them.
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Update: Business Insider notes that Meta has now added a warning message when users share chat queries.
The Meta AI app has been described as “a privacy disaster,” as users unknowingly make their embarrassing questions public.
One tech writer described it as like discovering your web browser history has been public all along without you knowing it …
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It looks like Meta’s smart glasses lineup is about to expand beyond Ray-Ban. A new verified Instagram page called “Oakley | Meta” popped up this week, teasing a joint product launch scheduled for Friday, June 20. Here’s what to expect.
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I bet nobody had ‘Meta arguing for privacy on Apple’s behalf’ on their tech bingo cards, but that’s exactly what the social networking company is hoping to do.
Meta has asked the court’s permission to give evidence in support of Apple’s privacy battle with the British government over a feature intended to apply end-to-end encryption to almost all iCloud data …
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Today, Meta shared (via The Verge) a few new details about Aria Gen 2, its next-generation experimental smart glasses.
While they’re still not meant for consumers, the hardware show just how fast Meta is moving and how far ahead it is thinking when it comes to the future of wearables, AI, and spatial computing. It also signals how quickly Apple will have to work if it really intends to do more than simply try to catch up. Again.
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