What fresh hell is it this time?? Look, we already knew Facebook had become the internet’s go-to repository for some of the most vile racism, insidious conspiracy theories, and unwanted attention from ex-boyfriends. And over the past few years, we’ve learned they’re so much worse. Hell, they very nearly destroyed our democracy — and still might! […]
Tag: Facebook
Leaked documents reveal the special rules Facebook uses for 5. 8M VIPs
Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images ) Facebook had a problem on its hands. People were posting things to their accounts that would get caught in the company’s automated moderation system or taken down by its human moderators. The problem wasn’t that the moderators, human or otherwise, were wrong to take […]
Lana Del Rey Says She Is Quitting Social Media: ‘I’m Going To Just Keep My Circle A Little Bit Closer’
Lana Del Rey is signing off social media for good. In a black-and-white video posted to Instagram on Saturday night, the 36-year-old singer announced that she’s deactivating all of her accounts at some point. It is unclear when exactly the artist will delete her online presence, but she explained her decision in one final post, […]
Ray-Ban Stories: These are Facebook’s first mass-market smart glasses
Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses, from Facebook and EssilorLuxottica. [credit: Facebook ] As previously rumored, Facebook has partnered with EssilorLuxottica to produce Ray-Ban Stories, one of the first potentially viable attempts at mass-market smart glasses. They are similar in some ways to early iterations of Snapchat Spectacles but with a more stylish aesthetic that looks right […]
The end of tech’s 9/11 era
Does tech have a future without mass surveillance? Read More
WhatsApp “end-to-end encrypted” messages aren’t that private after all
Enlarge / The security of Facebook’s popular messaging app leaves several rather important devils in its details. (credit: WhatsApp) Yesterday, independent newsroom ProPublica published a detailed piece examining the popular WhatsApp messaging platform’s privacy claims. The service famously offers “end-to-end encryption,” which most users interpret as meaning that Facebook, WhatsApp’s owner since 2014, can neither read […]
China’s online propaganda isn’t very good
Influence campaigns appear to have diminishing returns. Read More
Did DeepMind just make a big step toward more human-like A. I.?
The company’s researchers created software that learns to transfer skills and strategies across games. Read More
WhatsApp fined $267M for not telling users how it shared data with Facebook
Enlarge (credit: Stan Honda / Getty Images) WhatsApp has been fined €225 million for breaking the EU’s data privacy law by not telling its users how it was sharing their data with its parent company Facebook. In one of the biggest fines relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Irish data regulator applied […]
Joe Biden’s cybersecurity gap
The White House has pledged billions in cybersecurity upgrades. The holes, though, are glaring. Read More