l
l
blogger better. Powered by Blogger.

Search

Labels

blogger better

Followers

Blog Archive

Total Pageviews

Labels

Download

Blogroll

Featured 1

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 2

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 3

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 4

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 5

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Saturday, April 7, 2018

RSS is undead

RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead.

Now, with Facebook’s scandal over Cambridge Analytica, there is a whole new wave of commentators calling for RSS to be resuscitated. Brian Barrett at Wired said a week ago that “… anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that’s been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It’s time to head back to RSS.”

Let’s be clear: RSS isn’t coming back alive so much as it is officially entering its undead phase.

Don’t get me wrong, I love RSS. At its core, it is a beautiful manifestation of some of the most visionary principles of the internet, namely transparency and openness. The protocol really is simple and human-readable. It feels like how the internet was originally designed with static, full-text articles in HTML. Perhaps most importantly, it is decentralized, with no power structure trying to stuff other content in front of your face.

It’s wonderfully idealistic, but the reality of RSS is that it lacks the features required by nearly every actor in the modern content ecosystem, and I would strongly suspect that its return is not forthcoming.

Now, it is important before diving in here to separate out RSS the protocol from RSS readers, the software that interprets that protocol. While some of the challenges facing this technology are reader-centric and therefore fixable with better product design, many of these challenges are ultimately problems with the underlying protocol itself.

Let’s start with users. I, as a journalist, love having hundreds of RSS feeds organized in chronological order allowing me to see every single news story published in my areas of interest. This use case though is a minuscule fraction of all users, who aren’t paid to report on the news comprehensively. Instead, users want personalization and prioritization — they want a feed or stream that shows them the most important content first, since they are busy and lack the time to digest enormous sums of content.

To get a flavor of this, try subscribing to the published headlines RSS feed of a major newspaper like the Washington Post, which publishes roughly 1,200 stories a day. Seriously, try it. It’s an exhausting experience wading through articles from the style and food sections just to run into the latest update on troop movements in the Middle East.

Some sites try to get around this by offering an almost array of RSS feeds built around keywords. Yet, stories are almost always assigned more than one keyword, and keyword selection can vary tremendously in quality across sites. Now, I see duplicate stories and still manage to miss other stories I wanted to see.

Ultimately, all of media is prioritization — every site, every newspaper, every broadcast has editors involved in determining what is the hierarchy of information to be presented to users. Somehow, RSS (at least in its current incarnation) never understood that. This is both a failure of the readers themselves, but also of the protocol, which never forced publishers to provide signals on what was most and least important.

Another enormous challenge is discovery and curation. How exactly do you find good RSS feeds? Once you have found them, how do you group and prune them over time to maximize signal? Curation is one of the biggest on-boarding challenges of social networks like Twitter and Reddit, which has prevented both from reaching the stratospheric numbers of Facebook. The cold start problem with RSS is perhaps its greatest failing today, although could potentially be solved by better RSS reader software without protocol changes.

RSS’ true failings though are on the publisher side, with the most obvious issue being analytics. RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of how many RSS subscribers there are, due to the way that RSS readers cache feeds. No one knows how much time someone reads an article, or whether they opened an article at all. In this way, RSS shares a similar product design problem with podcasting, in that user behavior is essentially a black box.

For some users, that lack of analytics is a privacy boon. The reality though is that the modern internet content economy is built around advertising, and while I push for subscriptions all the time, such an economy still looks very distant. Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment.

RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. Given that the brand equity for media today is so important, losing your logo, colors, and fonts on an article is an effective way to kill enterprise value. This issue isn’t unique to RSS — it has affected Google’s AMP project as well as Facebook Instant Articles. Brands want users to know that the brand wrote something, and they aren’t going to use technologies that strip out what they consider to be a business critical part of their user experience.

These are just some of the product issues with RSS, and together they ensure that the protocol will never reach the ubiquity required to supplant centralized tech corporations. So, what are we to do then if we want a path away from Facebook’s hegemony?

I think the solution is a set of improvements. RSS as a protocol needs to be expanded so that it can offer more data around prioritization as well as other signals critical to making the technology more effective at the reader layer. This isn’t just about updating the protocol, but also about updating all of the content management systems that publish an RSS feed to take advantage of those features.

That leads to the most significant challenge — solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds, so that there is an incentive to improve and optimize the RSS experience. I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot.

Next, RSS readers need to get a lot smarter about marketing and on-boarding. They need to actively guide users to find where the best content is, and help them curate their feeds with algorithms (with some settings so that users like me can turn it off). These apps could be written in such a way that the feeds are built using local machine learning models, to maximize privacy.

Do I think such a solution will become ubiquitous? No, I don’t, and certainly not in the decentralized way that many would hope for. I don’t think users actually, truly care about privacy (Facebook has been stealing it for years — has that stopped its growth at all?) and they certainly aren’t news junkies either. But with the right business model in place, there could be enough users to make such a renewed approach to streams viable for companies, and that is ultimately the critical ingredient you need to have for a fresh news economy to surface and for RSS to come back to life.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J RSS is undead Danny Crichton https://ift.tt/2Jtpt0W
via IFTTT

Snapchat brings back chronological Stories feed for some

Snapchat has undone its controversial redesign’s most significant change in an update to some users today. A tab that shows Stories in reverse chronological order, replacing the redesign’s algorithmically sorted feed for many people.

We’ve reached out to Snap Inc and haven’t heard back.

Showing the most recent Stories first makes them predictable and coherent to browse. It helps you see what’s going on with friends right now. That could be helpful if you wanted to find out which friends were free to hang out or if there’s a party you could join.

Users are seeing the reverse chronological Stories feed in both the design where there’s just Stories and All tabs, as well as the design where there’s separate Stories and Chat tabs.

Snapchat has now re-added a chronological Stories feed

But reverse chronological order heavily prioritizes people who post frequently, which can bury your best friends. Snapchat’s move towards algorithmic ranking in its big redesign ensured that people you watched Stories from or chatted with most showed up at the top so you’d be less likely to miss their content. That’s similar to how Facebook’s feed worked for a long time, and how Instagram started ranking its feed two years ago. By moving social media stars and brands that don’t follow you back over to the Discover section as part of the redesign, there’s less noise in the chronological Stories list, so it works better than it did a year ago.

Switching to algorithmic sorting has helped Instagram and Twitter boost growth, which is likely why Snapchat made it part of the redesign. The company had seen daily active user growth sag from 17 percent to under 3 per quarter after the launch of Facebook’s Snapchat clone Instagram Stories. Snapchat saw growth improve after starting to roll out the algorithm-powered redesign in Q4 2017.

For the most hardcore Snapchat users who check it constantly, today’s update has been met with joy and gratitude. They were likely to see their closest friends’ posts no matter when or how infrequently they posted.

But ditching the algorithm could make it tougher for newer and less consistent Snapchat users who want to pop in and see the most relevant content instead of having to sort through distant acquaintances. That could inhibit growth. Essentially, Snapchat might have to decide between preferencing it’s most engaged and loyal users, or aiming to add more casual users.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2qj02XZ Snapchat brings back chronological Stories feed for some Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2Hg8Q84
via IFTTT

Friday, April 6, 2018

Senator warns Facebook better shape up or get ‘broken up’

In the run-up to Mark Zuckerberg’s first appearance before Congress, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden issued a warning to the company about what it can expect from lawmakers if it doesn’t radically alter course.

“Mr. Zuckerberg is going to have a couple of very unpleasant days before Congress next week and that’s the place to start,” Wyden said at the TechFestNW conference in his home state of Oregon on Friday.

“There are going to be people who are going to say Facebook ought to be broken up. There have been a number of proposals and ideas for doing it and I think unless [Zuckerberg] finds a way to honor the promise he made several years ago, he’s gonna have a law on his hands.”

The Senator added that he would support such a law.

For Wyden, concealing the truth about data sharing in the fine print is a deceptive practice that’s gone on too long.

“I think we got to establish a principle once and for all that you own your data, period,” Wyden said.

“What does that mean in the real world? It’s not enough for a company to bury some technical lingo in their [terms of service]… It’s not enough to have some convoluted process for opting out.”

While that might have been wishful thinking two weeks ago, the Oregon lawmaker believes that Facebook’s most recent scandal has creating the perfect opportunity for privacy reform.

“If there is a grassroots uprising about the issue of who owns user data, we can get it passed,” Wyden said, citing other pieces of bipartisan legislation that once seemed like a long-shot.

Wyden, one of the loudest digital privacy champions in Congress, wants the public to use Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica debacle to demand that social networks obtain “explicit consent” from users before sharing their personal data with anyone — including advertisers.

“It’s real basic. You have to give the okay for them to do anything with your data,” Wyden said.

Zuckerberg is slated to appear before the Senate’s commerce and judiciary committees on Tuesday and the House energy and commerce committee the following day.

To date, Facebook has always successfully squirmed out of seeing its chief executive with his right hand raised. This time, as pressure mounted from legislators, investors, advertisers and the public alike, the company conceded. The set of hearings is widely expected to be a milestone event in big tech’s reluctant shuffle toward getting its wings clipped in Congress.

Unfortunately for Facebook, its corporate willful ignorance around protecting user data echoes other recent privacy catastrophes — a context that won’t do it any favors.

“The reason that Facebook is in hot water is essentially the same reason that Equifax is in hot water,” Wyden said. “These companies have not gotten their heads around the idea that the data they collect is more than just their property.”



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Senator warns Facebook better shape up or get ‘broken up’ Taylor Hatmaker https://ift.tt/2HhMl2M
via IFTTT

Facebook reportedly suspends AggregateIQ over connection to improper data-sharing

AggregateIQ, a Canadian advertising tech and audience intelligence company, has been suspended by Facebook for allegedly being closely connected with SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, reported the National Observer.

News broke late last month that AIQ, which was deeply involved with (and handsomely paid by) pro-Leave Brexit groups, was not the independent Canadian data broker it claimed to be. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who blew the lid off the Cambridge Analytica story, explained it candidly to The Guardian:

Essentially it was set up as a Canadian entity for people who wanted to work on SCL projects who didn’t want to move to London. That’s how AIQ got started: originally to service SCL and Cambridge Analytica projects.

AIQ has maintained that it has operated independently. Dogged denials appear on its webpage:

AggregateIQ has never been and is not a part of Cambridge Analytica or SCL. Aggregate IQ has never entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica. Chris Wylie has never been employed by AggregateIQ. AggregateIQ has never managed, nor did we ever have access to, any Facebook data or database allegedly obtained improperly by Cambridge Analytica.

But the reporting in the Guardian makes these claims hard to take seriously. For instance, a founding member was listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as working at “SCL Canada,” the company had no website or phone number of its own for some time, and until 2016, AIQ’s only client was Cambridge Analytica. It really looks as if AIQ is simply a Canadian shell under which operations could be said to be performed independent of CA and SCL.

Whatever the nature of the connection, it was convincing enough for Facebook to put them in the same bucket. The company said in a statement to the National Observer:

In light of recent reports that AggregateIQ may be affiliated with SCL and may, as a result, have improperly received (Facebook) user data, we have added them to the list of entities we have suspended from our platform while we investigate.

That will put a damper on SCL Canada’s work for a bit — it’s hard to do social media targeting work when you’re not allowed on the premises of the biggest social network of them all. Note that no specific wrongdoing on AIQ’s part is suggested — it’s enough that it may be affiliated with SCL and as such may have had access to the dirty data.

I’ve asked both companies for confirmation and will update this post if I hear back.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Facebook reportedly suspends AggregateIQ over connection to improper data-sharing Devin Coldewey https://ift.tt/2H634IJ
via IFTTT

Twitter delays API change that could break Tweetbot, Twitterific, etc.

This morning, the developers of third-party Twitter clients Tweetbot, Twitterific, Tweetings and Talon banded together to highlight upcoming API changes that could potentially break the way their apps work. As you might expect, their collective user base — a base largely made up of folks who need more out of their Twitter app than the official one offers (or folks who, you know, just want a native Mac app after Twitter killed the official one) — got loud.

In response, Twitter has just announced plans to delay the API change for the time being.

Originally scheduled for June 19th, 2018, the API change would see Twitter’s “streaming” API replaced with its new “Account Activity” API.

The problem? The aforementioned developers point out that, with just two months before the change was set to be made, they and other third-party devs hadn’t gotten access to the new API — and changes like this take time to implement correctly.

Meanwhile, even once implemented, the new API seems to have limitations that could keep these apps from working as they do today, potentially breaking things like push notifications and automatic timeline refreshes. You can read the developer group’s breakdown here.

Twitter isn’t giving a new date for when it expects to retire the streaming API, but says that it’ll give “at least 90 days notice.”



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Twitter delays API change that could break Tweetbot, Twitterific, etc. Greg Kumparak https://ift.tt/2H1uqzE
via IFTTT

Twitter will publicize rules around abuse to test if behavior changes

As part of Twitter’s efforts to rid its platform of abuse and hate, the company is teaming up with researchers Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and J. Nathan Matias, a post-doc research associate at Princeton University, to study online abuse. Today, Twitter is going to start testing an idea that if it shows people its rules, behavior will improve.

“In an experiment starting today, Twitter is publicizing its rules, to test whether this improves civility,” Benesch and Matias wrote on Medium. “We proposed this idea to Twitter and designed an experiment to evaluate it.”

The idea is that by showing people the rules, their behavior will improve on the platform. The researchers point to evidence of when institutions clearly publish rules, people are more likely to follow them.

The researchers assure the privacy of Twitter users will be protected. For example, Twitter will only provide anonymized, aggregated information.

“Since we will not receive identifying information on any individual person or Twitter account, we cannot and will not mention anyone or their Tweets in our publications,” the researchers wrote.

Last month, Twitter began soliciting proposals from the public to help the social network capture, measure and evaluate healthy interactions on the platform. This was part of Twitter’s commitment “to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in a tweet.

It’s not clear how widespread the test will be. I’ve reached out to Twitter and will update this story if I learn more. In the meantime, holler at me (megan@techcrunch.com) if these rules show up for you.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Twitter will publicize rules around abuse to test if behavior changes Megan Rose Dickey https://ift.tt/2GHllIT
via IFTTT

Facebook demands ID verification for big Pages, “issue” ad buyers

Facebook is looking to self-police by implementing parts of the proposed Honest Ads Act before the government tries to regulate it. To fight fake news and election interference, Facebook will require the admins of popular Facebook Pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent, or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked.

Meanwhile, Facebook plans to use this information to append a “Political Ad” label and “Paid for by” information to all election, politics, and issue ads. Users can report any ads they think are missing the label, and Facebook will show if a Page has changed its name to thwart deception. Facebook started the verification process this week, users in the U.S. will start seeing the labels and buyer info later this spring, and Facebook will expand the effort to ads around the world in the coming months.

Overall, it’s a smart start that comes way too late. As soon as Facebook started heavily promoting its ability to run influential election ads, it should have voluntarily adopted similar verification and labeling rules as traditional media. Instead, it was so focused on connecting people to politics, it disregarded how the connection could be perverted to power mass disinformation and destabilization campaigns.

“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.” You can see his full post below.

The move follows Twitter’s November announcement that it too would label political ads and show who they were bought by.

Twitter’s mockup for its “Political” ad labels and “paid for by” information

Facebook also gave a timeline for releasing both its tools for viewing all ads run by Pages, and to create a Political Ad Archive. A searchable index of all ads with the “political” label, including their images, text, target demographics, and how much was spent on them will launch in June and keep ads visible for four years after they run. Meanwhile, the Vew Ads tool that’s been testing in Canada will roll out globally in June so users can see any ad run by a Page, not just those targeted to them.

Facebook announced in October it would require documentation from election advertisers and label their ads, but now is applying those requirements to a much wider swath of ads that deal with big issues impacted by politics. That could protect users from disinformation and divisive content not just during elections, but any time bad actors are trying to drive wedges into society. Facebook wouldn’t reveal the threshhold of followers that will trigger Pages needing verification but confirmed it will not apply to small-to-medium size businesses.

By self-regulating, Facebook may be able to take the wind out calls for new laws that apply buyer disclosure rules on TV and other traditional media ads to online ads. Zuckerberg will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10, as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. Having today’s announcement to point to could give him more protection against criticism during the hearings, though congress will surely want to know why these safeguards hadn’t been in place already.

With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one…

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Friday, April 6, 2018

For more on Facebook’s recent troubles, check out our feature stories:



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2GEudie Facebook demands ID verification for big Pages, “issue” ad buyers Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2H0XKWE
via IFTTT

Facebook demands ID verification for big Pages, “issue” ad buyers

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook demands ID verification for big Pages, “issue” ad buyers https://ift.tt/2H0XKWE https://ift.tt/2GEudie April 06, 2018 at 08:02PM

Facebook is looking to self-police by implementing parts of the proposed Honest Ads Act before the government tries to regulate it. To fight fake news and election interference, Facebook will require the admins of popular Facebook Pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent, or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked.

Meanwhile, Facebook plans to use this information to append a “Political Ad” label and “Paid for by” information to all election, politics, and issue ads. Facebook started the verification process this week, users in the U.S. will start seeing the labels and buyer info later this spring, and Facebook will expand the effort to ads around the world in the coming months.

“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.” You can see his full post below.

The move follows Twitter’s November announcement that it too would label political ads and show who they were bought by.

Twitter’s mockup for its “Political” ad labels and “paid for by” information

Facebook also gave a timeline for releasing both its tools for viewing all ads run by Pages, and to create a Political Ad Archive. A searchable index of all ads with the “political” label, including their images, text, target demographics, and how much was spent on them will launch in June and keep ads visible for four years after they run. Meanwhile, the Vew Ads tool that’s been testing in Canada will roll out globally in June so users can see any ad run by a Page, not just those targeted to them.

Facebook announced in October it would require documentation from election advertisers and label their ads, but now is applying those requirements to a much wider swath of ads that deal with big issues impacted by politics. That could protect users from disinformation and divisive content not just during elections, but any time bad actors are trying to drive wedges into society. Facebook wouldn’t reveal the threshhold of followers that will trigger Pages needing verification but confirmed it will not apply to small-to-medium size businesses.

By self-regulating, Facebook may be able to take the wind out calls for new laws that apply buyer disclosure rules on TV and other traditional media ads to online ads. Zuckerberg will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10, as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. Having today’s announcement to point to could give him more protection against criticism during the hearings.

With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one…

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Friday, April 6, 2018

For more on Facebook’s recent troubles, check out our feature stories:

Facebook plans to let everyone unsend messages, won’t let Zuckerberg until then

TechCrunch reported last night that Facebook retracted Facebook messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg and other executives from their recipients’ inboxes. That’s an ability normal Facebook users don’t have. But now Facebook tells me it plans to make an “unsend” feature available to all users in several months, and has already been considering how to build this product. Until the unsend feature is released for everyone, Facebook says it won’t unsend or retract any more of Zuckerberg’s messages.

The retractions of the CEO’s chats were never previously disclosed until Facebook confirmed the news to TechCrunch last night after we reported having email receipt evidence of messages that have since disappeared. Many users are seeing that as a breach of trust.

For the full story on Zuckerberg’s disappearing messages, check out our feature story:

To recap, now six sources confirm that Facebook messages they had received from Mark Zuckerberg had disappeared from their inboxes. When we told Facebook we had an email receipt proving the retractions,  Facebook gave TechCrunch this statement: “After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”

But tampering with users’ inboxes without disclosure has struck many users a violation of Facebook’s power. Many asked why Zuckerberg and other executives had access to functionality not offered to regular users.

Facebook encrypted “Secret” messaging feature includes an Unsend option with an expiration timer. But Zuckerberg and other executives didn’t use this, and instead had their permanent messages specially retracted.

Facebook tells TechCrunch is hasn’t finalized exactly how the unsend feature will work. A Facebook Messenger spokesperson tells me only possible option is an expiration timer users can set on messages. When the timer runs out, the message would disappear from both their and the recipients’ inboxes. They tell me this is similar to how retractions of Zuckerberg’s messages work.

Facebook already offers a “Secret” encrypted messaging feature that includes an Unsend expiration timer. But this can’t be used in existing traditional Facebook message threads, and instead users have to launch a separate “Secret” conversation. Zuckerberg and other executives weren’t using this feature, and instead had their permanant, non-“Secret” messages retracted. Instagram also offers an Unsend option in its Direct messaging feature, but warns that while it can retract sent messages, the recipient may have already read them.

But in the coming months, Facebook will bring either this expiration timer or another way to Unsend messages to all Messenger threads. Facebook didn’t have details about whether recipients would be notified when a message was unsent and retracted from their inboxes.

Beyond the dubious ethics of Facebook manipulating users’ private messaging threads without consent or disclosure, Zuckerberg and other executives, there’s the question of whether and unsend feature is good for Facebook at all. It could make users more willing to share vulnerable, sensitive, or confidential professional messages. But it also might make users paranoid that messages they receive could disappear, leading to anxious screenshotting. It could also lead to abuse if users think they can send offensive content then have it retracted shortly after it’s seen.

Facebook could have announced plans for the Unsend feature at any time. It could have disclosed the retractions of Zuckerberg’s messages at any time. But waiting until it was confronted with evidence of the deletions and public backlash shows Facebook is only being transparent with users when forced.

If you have more info on this situation, including evidence of messages from other Facebook executives disappearing, please contact this article’s author Josh Constine via open Twitter DMs, josh@techcrunch.com, or encrypted Signal chat at (585)750-5674.

For more on Facebook’s recent struggles, read our feature pieces:



from Social – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/facebook-secret-messages.png?w=663 Facebook plans to let everyone unsend messages, won’t let Zuckerberg until then Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2H2Sl1o
via IFTTT

Selina raises $95M to create a boutique travel lodging experience built around communities

If you’re looking to travel abroad — and especially if you’re looking to work while doing so — it might be tough to convince yourself you can find a cool boutique hotel that caters to a lot of different price points, as well as surround yourself with people that will help you feel like you should still get your work done.

That’s the goal of Selina, an emerging co-working and traveling hospitality service that opens up campuses geared toward fitting those niches across Central America. What started as originally just a real estate company has now turned into a venture-funded startup called Selina, which goes around the world creating a different kind of hotel product out of renovated older properties. Instead of just renting out a room in an Airbnb or paying for a hotel room in a boutique hotel, or some co-working space, Selina aims to be a more streamlined way to get that mixture of a community experience, a boutique hotel feel, and the ease of getting a consistent experience across multiple different properties. The company said today it’s raised $95 million from Abraaj Group and WeWork founder Adam Neumann.

“There are lifestyle hotels, surf camps, co-working places, hostels, and all those kinds of properties, Yoav Gery, Selina’s president, said. “A lot of companies talk the same talk. What was different about us and what we were telling the world is we were doing something different in the hospitality world. We’re creating a much more holistic program for the traveler. It’s not just a hotel, or for co-working. It’s everything that the traveler would want. And we hope the speed at which we’re doing it is also unique. Most hotels couldn’t get a product and convert it in 3 or 4 months into a new brand.”

You can think of Selina almost as a kind of ramped-up hostel — where you’re getting people of all different backgrounds into one spot to meet each other and get a feel for the area. But Selina still does serve different price points, from the bunk room set-up at a common hostel for under $30 a night to a more traditional private room that you’d find in an Airbnb or hotel for a higher price. The whole point, Gery said, is that customers shouldn’t be spending most of their time in their rooms.

Selina started in Central America and has since begun expanding throughout those countries, and the company hopes to begin expanding into the United States and Europe this year as it continues to make inroads into Latin America. Selina looks to hire people that have the specific experience working with those regions when it comes to taxes and regulations, and one of the benefits it has is that it is usually repurposing old real estate. That means, in theory, most things should already be up to code for a hospitality project, Gery said.

“We are the first co to capitalize on this lifestyle shift for travelers and the way people are working,” Selina VP of strategy Brynne McNulty Rojas said. “People are eager to see the way we’re offering all these different business lines to make people feel at home, whether or not they’re on vacation or working. We do the market research, and exactly the target beds we want, that’s what gave people comfort — that we were going to be able to achieve the scale we were projecting. We wanted to focus on having that Selina DNA and that simplicity of experience and transactions and making it a nice, tech-first way of traveling and living and working.”

Part of the process is finding those old areas to renovate, but Selina hopes to also build out a strategy where it knows the exact needs for each of those properties — and how to properly staff them. The company hopes to be able to operate efficiently with a hospitality staff of between 30 or 40, though that could vary from property to property depending on the location. After all, an experience in Brooklyn is probably going to look radically different from one on the coast of Belize.

Then there’s the data aspect of it, where Selina is able — like any emerging hospitality service such as Airbnb, for example — to collect the right information from potential customers. But while Airbnb might be centered around that individual experience, Rojas said it wants to use data from potential visitors to improve the more community-oriented experience at Selina. In the end, it’s about having that campus-oriented feel to it rather than just renting someone’s home on the beach, she said.

The challenge, of course, is going to be going up against emerging hospitality services — like Airbnb, of course, which could work with a host to create a similar experience through a platform-oriented approach. But the company hopes it’ll have that vibe of a unified hotel chain experience in addition to being able to scale it up at the rate of a startup and be able to show investors that its ability to rapidly create new properties is what will make it be successful.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Selina raises $95M to create a boutique travel lodging experience built around communities https://ift.tt/2GGN8Ny

Amazon rolls out remote access to its FreeTime parental controls

{rss:content:encoded} Amazon rolls out remote access to its FreeTime parental controls https://ift.tt/2Iualic https://ift.tt/2Jqbzg3 April 06, 2018 at 04:31PM

Amazon is making it easier for parents to manage their child’s device usage from their own phone, tablet, or PC with an update to the Parent Dashboard in Amazon FreeTime. Since its launch in 2012, Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited has been one of the better implementations of combining kid-friendly content with customizable profiles and parental controls. Today, parents can monitor and manage kids’ screen time, time limits, daily educational goals, device activity, and more while allowing children to access family-friendly content like books, videos, apps and games.

Last year, Amazon introduced a Parent Dashboard as another means of helping parents monitor screen time as well as have conversations with kids about what they’re doing on their devices. For example, if the child was reading a particular book, the dashboard might prompt parents with questions they could ask about the books’ content. The dashboard also provided a summary of the child’s daily device use, including things like what books were read, videos watched, apps or games played, and websites visited, and for how long.

According to a research study Amazon commissioned with Kelton Global Research, the company found that 97 percent of parents monitor or manage their kids’ use of tablets and smartphones, but 75 percent don’t want to hover over kids when they’re using their devices.

On Thursday, Amazon addressed this problem by allowing parents to remotely configure the parental control settings from the online Parent Dashboard in order to manage the child’s device from afar from a phone, tablet or computer.

The controls are the same as those available through the child’s device itself. Parents can set a device bedtime, daily goals and time limits, adjust their smart filter, and enable the web browser remotely. They can also remotely add new books, videos, apps and games to their child’s FreeTime profile, and lock or unlock the device for a set period of time.

The addition comes following last year’s launch of FreeTime on Android, and Google’s own entry into the parental control software space with the public launch of Family Link last fall. Apple also this year made vague promises about improving its existing parental controls in the future, in response to pressure from two Apple shareholder groups, Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.

With the increased activity in the parental control market, Amazon’s FreeTime may lose some of its competitive advantages. Amazon also needed to catch up to the remote control capabilities provided with Google’s Family Link.

There are those who argue that parental controls that do things like limit kids’ activity on apps and games or turn off access to the internet are enablers of lazy parenting, where devices instead of people are setting the rules. But few parents use parental controls in that fashion. Rather, they establish house rules then use software to remind children the rules exist and to enforce them.

The updated FreeTime Parent Dashboard is available via a mobile-optimized website at parents.amazon.com.

 

Facebook data scandal also affects 2.7M EU citizens

Another data-point to flesh out the Facebook data misuse scandal: The company has informed the European Commission that a total of 2.7 million EU citizens had their information improperly shared with the controversial political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica (via Reuters).

Facebook had already revealed a breakdown of the top ten markets of affected users. But in the list of countries it published the only EU nation was the UK — which it said could have up to almost 1.08M affected users. So up to a further million EU citizens could also have had their data swiped as a result of the scandal, without their knowledge or consent.

Privacy is a fundamental right under the bloc’s legal regime so the improper sharing of millions of EU citizens’ data could have legal consequences for the company.

“Facebook confirmed to us that the data of overall up to 2.7 million Europeans or people in the EU to be more precise may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. The letter also explains the steps Facebook has taken in response since,” an EC spokesman told Reuters.

At the time of writing Facebook could not immediately be reached for comment.

The company is a signatory to the EU-US Privacy Shield framework; a mechanism which came into force in mid 2016 — replacing the invalidated Safe Harbor arrangement which had stood for 15 years — intended to simplify the process of authorizing transfers of EU citizens’ personal data across the Atlantic.

Companies on the Privacy Shield list self-certify to adhere to a set of privacy principles. However they can be removed if they are determined to have violated their obligations — with the US’ FTC acting as the enforcement authority.

The same federal watchdog is now investigating Facebook as a result of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.  Nor is this the first time the FTC has probed Facebook’s actions in relation to user privacy. In 2011 it charged the company over deceptive privacy claims.

In the subsequent FTC settlement Facebook committed to giving users “clear and prominent notice” and to obtaining their consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings.

Facebook will now need to explain to the FTC how its actions in 2013-2015 mesh with that earlier consent agreement.

In mid 2015 the company finally tightened app permissions’ settings for all developers on its platform. But prior to that these had been lax enough for vast amounts of personal data to be sucked out without most users being aware — because the data sharing was being ‘authorized’ by their Facebook friends (who also likely weren’t aware what they were agreeing to).

So, for example, just 558 Filipino Facebook users installed the personality quiz app that passed data to Cambridge Analytica — yet the company was able to grab personal data on up to 1,175,312 more users in that country as a result of how Facebook allowed people’s data to be shared with developers on its platform.

Yesterday Facebook admitted as many as 87 million users in total could have had their personal info shared with Cambridge Analytica after 270k people downloaded the quiz app on its platform. (Though CA has disputed the 87M figure, claiming it only licensed data from the quiz app developer for 30M Facebook users.)

Writing about the data misuse scandal in the Harvard Law Review, David Vladeck, the FTC’s former director, argues there are now only two interpretations of Facebook’s actions vis-a-vis data protection and user privacy: Cluelessness or venality.

“Facebook now has three strikes against it: Beacon, the privacy modifications it made in 2009 to force private user information public, and now the Kogan/Cambridge Analytica revelation,” he writes. “Facebook can’t claim to be clueless about how this happened. The FTC consent decree put Facebook on notice. All of Facebook’s actions were calculated and deliberate, integral to the company’s business model, and at odds with the company’s claims about privacy and its corporate values. So many of the signs of venality are present.”

“[V]ague and unenforceable promises are not enough,” he adds. “The better approach would be for Facebook to acknowledge that it violated the consent decree and to come to the FTC with specific proposals for serious and enduring reform.”

In terms of specific proposals to reform privacy rules, Vladeck suggests Facebook needs to create systems that ensure third parties do not have access to user data “without safeguards that are effective, easy to use, and verifiable”.

“When third party access is sought, users must be given clear notice and an opportunity to say yes or no – that is, the gateway must be notice and the affirmative express consent required by the 2011 decree,” he adds. “Facebook also must develop accountability systems that prove that consumers have in fact consented to each use of their data by Facebook or by third parties. And Facebook must agree to refrain from using blanket consents; after all, blanket consents are the enemy of informed consent.”

In his view the company also needs to create systems to audit third party data collection and sharing “on an ongoing basis” — and thereby “hold third parties to their promises by engineering controls and contractual lockups” — including “effective remedies when third parties break the rules – including enforceable rights to audit, retrieve, delete and destroy data improperly acquired or used, and liquidated and actual damages for violations”. Rather than taking it on trust that developers given access to masses of user data will do the right thing.

“Facebook must also be accountable to the public,” he adds. “There must be far more robust reporting to the FTC, but those reports are non-public. To re-establish trust with its uses, Facebook should consider appointing a data ombudsperson and establishing a group outside the company that have unfettered access to Facebook data and employees to ensure that Facebook is now, finally, honoring its commitments to users, and this group should periodically report its findings on Facebook’s compliance.”



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Facebook data scandal also affects 2.7M EU citizens Natasha Lomas https://ift.tt/2EmuoNj
via IFTTT

Myanmar group blasts Zuckerberg’s claim on Facebook hate speech prevention

It’s becoming common to say that Mark Zuckerberg is coming under fire, but the Facebook CEO is again being questioned, this time over a recent claim that Facebook’s internal monitoring system is able to thwart attempts to use its services to incite hatred.

Speaking to Vox, Zuckerberg used the example of Myanmar, where he claimed Facebook had successfully rooted out and prevented hate speech through a system that scans chats inside Messenger. In this case, Messenger had been used to send messages to Buddhists and Muslims with the aim of creating conflict on September 11 last year.

Zuckerberg told Vox:

The Myanmar issues have, I think, gotten a lot of focus inside the company. I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, “Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.” And then the same thing on the other side.

So that’s the kind of thing where I think it is clear that people were trying to use our tools in order to incite real harm. Now, in that case, our systems detect that that’s going on. We stop those messages from going through. But this is certainly something that we’re paying a lot of attention to.

That claim has been rejected in a letter signed by six organizations in Myanmar, including tech accelerator firm Phandeeyar. Far from a success, the group said the incident shows why Facebook is not equipped to respond to hate speech in international markets since it relied entirely on information from the ground, where Facebook does not have an office, in order to learn of the issue.

The group — which includes hate speech monitor Myanmar ICT for Development Organization and the Center for Social Integrity — explained that some four days elapsed between the sending of the first message and Facebook responding with a view to taking action.

In your interview, you refer to your detection ‘systems’. We believe your system, in this case, was us – and we were far from systematic. We identified the messages and escalated them to your team via email on Saturday the 9th September, Myanmar time. By then, the messages had already been circulating widely for three days.

The Messenger platform (at least in Myanmar) does not provide a reporting function, which would have enabled concerned individuals to flag the messages to you. Though these dangerous messages were deliberately pushed to large numbers of people – many people who received them say they did not personally know the sender – your team did not seem to have picked up on the pattern. For all of your data, it would seem that it was our personal connection with senior members of your team which led to the issue being dealt with.

Myanmar has only recently embraced the internet in recent times, thanks to the slashing of the cost of a SIM card — which was once as much as $300 — but already most people in the country are online. Since its internet revolution has taken place over the last five years, the level of Facebook adoption per person is one of the highest in the world.

“Out of a 50 million population, there are nearly 30 million active users on Facebook every month,” Phandeeyar CEO Jes Petersen told TechCrunch. “There’s this notion to many people that Facebook is the internet.”

Young men browse their Facebook wall on their smartphones as they sit in a street in Yangon on August 20, 2015. Facebook remains the dominant social network for US Internet users, while Twitter has failed to keep apace with rivals like Instagram and Pinterest, a study showed. AFP PHOTO / Nicolas ASFOURI (Photo credit should read NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)

Facebook optimistically set out to connect the world, and particularly facilitate communication between governments and people, so that statistic may appear at face value to fit with its goal of connecting the world, but the platform has been abused in Myanmar.

Chiefly that has centered around stoking tension between the Muslim and Buddhist populations in the country.

The situation in the country is so severe that an estimated 700,000 Rohingya refugees are thought to have fled to neighboring Bangladesh following a Myanmar government crackdown that began in August. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has labeled the actions as ethnic cleansing, as has the UN.

Tensions inflamed, Facebook has been a primary outlet for racial hatred from high-profile individuals inside Myanmar. One of them, monk Ashin Wirathu who is barred from public speaking due to past history, moved online to Facebook where he quickly found an audience. Though he had his Facebook account shuttered, he has vowed to open new ones in order to continue to amplifly his voice via the social network.

Beyond visible figures, the platform has been ripe for anti-Muslim and anti-Rohinga memes and false new stories to go viral. UN investigators last month said Facebook has played a key role spreading hate.

Petersen said that Phandeeyar — which helped Facebook draft its local language community standards page — and others have held regular information meetings with the social network on the occasions that it has visited Myanmar. But the fact that it does not have an office in the country nor local speakers on its permanent staff has meant that little to nothing has been done.

Likewise, there is no organizational structure to handle the challenging situation in Myanmar, with many of its policy team based in Australia, and Facebook itself is not customized to solicit feedback from users in the country.

“If you are serious about making Facebook better, we urge you to invest more into moderation — particularly in countries, such as Myanmar, where Facebook has rapidly come to play a dominant role in how information is accessed and communicated,” the group wrote.

“We urge you to be more intent and proactive in engaging local groups, such as ours, who are invested in finding solutions, and — perhaps most importantly — we urge you to be more transparent about your processes, progress and the performance of your interventions, so as to enable us to work more effectively together,” they added in the letter.

Facebook has offices covering five of Southeast Asia’s largest countries — Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines — and its approach to expansion has seemed to focus on advertising sales opportunities, with most staff in the region being sales or account management personnel. Using that framing, Myanmar — with a nascent online advertising space — isn’t likely to qualify for an office, but Phandeyaar’s Petersen believes there’s a strong alternative case.

“Myanmar could be a really good test market for how you fix these problems,” he said in an interview. “The issues are not exclusive to Myanmar, but Facebook is so dominant and there are serious issues in the country — here is an opportunity to test ways to mitigate hate speech and fake news.”

Indeed, Zuckerberg has been praised for pushing to make Facebook less addictive, even at the expense of reduced advertising revenue. By the same token, Facebook could sacrifice profit and invest in opening more offices worldwide to help live up to the responsibility of being the de facto internet in many countries. Hiring local people to work hand-in-hand with communities would be a huge step forward to addressing these issues.

With over $4 billion in profit per quarter, it’s hard to argue that Facebook can’t justify the cost of a couple of dozen people in countries where it has acknowledged that there are local issues. Like the newsfeed changes, there is probably a financially-motivated argument that a safer Facebook is better for business, but the humanitarian responsibility alone should be enough to justify the costs.

In a statement, Facebook apologized that Zuckerberg had not acknowledged the role of the local groups in reporting the messages.

“We took their reports very seriously and immediately investigated ways to help prevent the spread of this content. We should have been faster and are working hard to improve our technology and tools to detect and prevent abusive, hateful or false content,” a spokesperson said.

The company said it is rolling a feature to allow Messenger users to report abusive content inside the app. It said also that it has added more Burmese language reviewers to handle content across its services.

“There is more we need to do and we will continue to work with civil society groups in Myanmar and around the world to do better,” the spokesperson added.

The company didn’t respond when we asked if there are plans to open an office in Myanmar.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 11: Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the TechCrunch Conference at SF Design Center on September 11, 2012 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by C Flanigan/WireImage)

Zuckerberg’s interview with Vox itself was one of the first steps of a media campaign that the Facebook supremo has embarked on in response to a wave of criticism and controversy that the company has weathered over the way it handles user data.

Facebook was heavily criticised last year for allowing Russian parties to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election using its platform, but the drama has intensified in recent weeks.

The company’s data privacy policy came under fire after it emerged that a developer named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan used the platform to administer a personality test app that collected data about participants and their friends. That data was then passed to Cambridge Analytica where it may have been leveraged to optimize political campaigns including that of 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Brexit vote, allegations which the company itself vehemently denies. Regardless of how the data was employed to political ends, that lax data sharing was enough to ignite a firestorm around Facebook’s privacy practices.

Zuckerberg himself fronted a rare call with reporters this week in which he answered questions on a range of topics, including whether he should resign as Facebook CEO. (He said he won’t.)

Most recently, Facebook admitted that as many as 87 million people on the service may have been impacted by Cambridge Analytica’s activities. That’s some way above its initial estimate of 50 million. Zuckerberg is scheduled to appear in front of Congress to discuss the affair, and likely a whole lot more, on April 11.

Following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, the company’s stock dropped precipitously, wiping more than $60 billion off its market capitalization from its prior period of stable growth.

Added to this data controversy, Facebook has been found to have deleted messages that Zuckerberg and other senior executives sent to some users, as TechCrunch’s Josh Constine reported this week. That’s despite the fact that Facebook and its Messenger product do not allow ordinary users to delete sent messages from a recipient’s inbox.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2GBH7l2 Myanmar group blasts Zuckerberg’s claim on Facebook hate speech prevention Jon Russell https://ift.tt/2JoJwxa
via IFTTT

Zuckerberg will also testify before the Senate

Earlier this week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slated to testify on the use and protection of user data in Washington D.C. on April 11. Turns out, Zuckerberg will have a busier week in D.C. than expected, with the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees announcing a joint hearing with the Facebook boss.

The Senate hearing will go down on April 10, a day before Zuckerberg appears before the House Committee.

The hearing, convened by Senate Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), is titled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data.”

The hearing will take place in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center at 2:15pm ET.

Here’s what Senator Thune had to say in a prepared statement:

Facebook now plays a critical role in many social relationships, informing Americans about current events, and pitching everything from products to political candidates. Our joint hearing will be a public conversation with the CEO of this powerful and influential company about his vision for addressing problems that have generated significant concern about Facebook’s role in our democracy, bad actors using the platform, and user privacy.

Zuckerberg brought up the possibility of speaking to congress in late March, saying: “If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.”



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Zuckerberg will also testify before the Senate Jordan Crook https://ift.tt/2GDH1pa
via IFTTT

Zuckerberg will also testify before the Senate

Earlier this week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slated to testify on the use and protection of user data in Washington D.C. on April 11. Turns out, Zuckerberg will have a busier week in D.C. than expected, with the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees announcing a joint hearing with the Facebook boss.

The Senate hearing will go down on April 10, a day before Zuckerberg appears before the House Committee.

The hearing, convened by Senate Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), is titled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data.”

The hearing will take place in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center at 2:15pm ET.

Here’s what Senator Thune had to say in a prepared statement:

Facebook now plays a critical role in many social relationships, informing Americans about current events, and pitching everything from products to political candidates. Our joint hearing will be a public conversation with the CEO of this powerful and influential company about his vision for addressing problems that have generated significant concern about Facebook’s role in our democracy, bad actors using the platform, and user privacy.

Zuckerberg brought up the possibility of speaking to congress in late March, saying: “If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Zuckerberg will also testify before the Senate https://ift.tt/2GDH1pa

Facebook, AggregateIQ now being jointly probed by Canada, B.C. data watchdogs

Privacy watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia are combining existing investigations into Facebook and AggregateIQ. The latter being a Victoria-based ad targeting tech company that has been linked to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy at the center of the Facebook data misuse storm.

CA whistleblower Chris Wylie — who last month gave public testimony revealing how millions of Facebook users’ data was passed to his former employer for political ad targeting — has described AggregateIQ as the Canadian arm of CA’s parent entity, SCL. (Although AggregateIQ has denied any affiliation with CA or SCL, claiming on its website “it is and has always been 100% Canadian owned and operated”.)

“The investigations will examine whether the organizations [Aggregate IQ and Facebook] are in compliance with Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act(PIPEDA) and BC’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA),” said Canada’s watchdog in a statement about the now joint investigation.

“The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC opened its investigation into AggregateIQ late last year. Last month, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada launched an investigation into allegations about unauthorized access and use of Facebook user profiles.

“The two offices decided to jointly investigate these matters as Facebook and AggregateIQ are subject to both PIPEDA and PIPA.”

The statement does not go into any new detail about the investigations as it notes they are ongoing.

The OPCC’s Facebook investigation, which was launched on March 20, followed a complaint against the company. Facebook has since confirmed that more than 620k Canadian users had their data scraped and passed to CA — the majority of whom would not have consented or even known their information was being shared in this way.

Meanwhile AggregateIQ’s role in the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum vote has been the subject of increasing scrutiny in the country, following a lengthy investigation by the Observer of London looking at links between the various entities involved and how money was spent by different groups campaigning for the UK to leave the European Union.

The company received £3.5M from leave campaign groups in the run up to the 2016 referendum, and has been described by leave campaigners as instrumental in securing their win.

AggregateIQ is now among 30 companies being investigated by the UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, as part of an ongoing (and now almost year-long) investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are also part of that probe.

Giving an update on the investigation yesterday, the ICO said it looking at “how data was collected from a third party app on Facebook and shared with Cambridge Analytica”.

The watchdog secured a warrant to enter and search the London offices of CA last month.

The UK’s Electoral Commission is also investigation Brexit campaign spending — and has previously asked Facebook, Twitter and Google to provide information about ad spending linked to Russia.

Earlier this month Facebook revealed it had removed 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts run by the Russian government-connected troll farm the Internet Research Agency.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the now joint Canadian and British Columbian data probe.

Facebook is also facing shareholder lawsuits and a probe by the FTC into the data misuse scandal, among others.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Facebook, AggregateIQ now being jointly probed by Canada, B.C. data watchdogs Natasha Lomas https://ift.tt/2Jn6wg6
via IFTTT

Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes https://ift.tt/2JpXgYQ https://ift.tt/2GCaL5D April 06, 2018 at 06:01AM

You can’t remove Facebook messages from the inboxes of people you sent them to, but Facebook did that for Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspiculously remain. An email receipt of a Facebook message from 2010 reviewed by TechCrunch proves Zuckerberg sent people messages that no longer appear in their Facebook chat logs or in the files available from Facebook’s Download Your Information tool.

When asked by TechCrunch about the situation, Facebook claimed it was done for corporate security in this statement:

“After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”

However, Facebook never publicly disclosed the removal of messages from users’ inboxes, nor privately informed the recipients. That raises the question of whether this was a breach of user trust. When asked that question directly over Messenger, Zuckerberg declined to provide a statement.

Tampering With Users’ Inboxes

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that users can only delete messages their own inboxes, and that they would still show up in the recipient’s thread. There appears to be no “retention period” for normal users’ messages, as my inbox shows messages from as early as 2005. That indicates Zuckerberg and other executives received special treatment in being able to pull back previously sent messages.

Facebook chats sent by Zuckerberg from several years ago or older were missing from the inboxes of both former employees and non-employees. What’s left makes it look the recipients were talking to themselves, as only their side of back-and-forth conversations with Zuckerberg still appear. Three sources asked to remain anonymous out of fear of angering Zuckerberg or burning bridges with the company.

[Update: Recent messages from Zuckerberg remain in users’ inboxes. Old messages from before 2014 still appear to some users, indicating the retraction did not apply to all chats the CEO sent. But more sources have come forward since publication, saying theirs disappeared as well.]

None of Facebook’s terms of service appear to give it the right to remove content from users’ accounts unless it violates the company’s community standards. While it’s somewhat standard for corporations to have data retention policies that see them delete emails or other messages from their own accounts that were sent by employees, they typically can’t remove the messages from the accounts of recipients outside the company. It’s rare that these companies own the communication channel itself and therefore host both sides of messages as Facebook does in this case, which potentially warrants a different course of action with more transparency than quietly retracting the messages.

Facebook’s power to tamper with users’ private message threads could alarm some. The issue is amplified by the fact that Facebook Messenger now has 1.3 billion users, making it one of the most popular communication utilities in the world.

Zuckerberg is known to have a team that helps him run his Facebook profile, with some special abilities for managing his 105 million followers and constant requests for his attention. For example, Zuckerberg’s profile doesn’t show a button to add him as a friend on desktop, and the button is grayed out and disabled on mobile. But the ability to change the messaging inboxes of other users is far more concerning.

Facebook may have sought to prevent leaks of sensitive corporate communications. Following the Sony hack, emails of Sony’s president Michael Lynton who sat on Snap Inc’s board were exposed, revealing secret acquisitions and strategy.

Mark Zuckerberg during the early days of Facebook

However, Facebook may have also looked to thwart the publication of potentially embarrassing personal messages sent by Zuckerberg or other executives. In 2010, Silicon Valley Insider published now-infamous instant messages from a 19-year-old Zuckerberg to a friend shortly after starting The Facebook in 2004. “yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard . . . just ask . . . i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns” Zuckerberg wrote to a friend. “what!? how’d you manage that one?” they asked. “people just submitted it . .  i don’t know why . . . they “trust me” . . . dumb fucks” Zuckerberg explained.

The New Yorker later confirmed the messages with Zuckerberg, who told the publication he “absolutely” regretted them. “If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I’ve grown and learned a lot” said Zuckerberg.

If the goal of Facebook’s security team was to keep a hacker from accessing the accounts of executives and therefore all of their messages, they could have merely been deleted on their side the way any Facebook user is free to do, without them disappearing from the various recipients’ inboxes. If Facebook believed it needed to remove the messages entirely from its servers in case the company’s backend systems we breached, a disclosure of some kind seems reasonable.

Now as Facebook encounters increased scrutiny regarding how it treats users’ data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the retractions could become a bigger issue. Zuckerberg is slated to speak in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10 as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. They could request more information about Facebook removing messages or other data from users’ accounts without their consent. While Facebook is trying to convey that it understands its responsibilities, the black mark left on public opinion by past behavior may prove permanent.

If you have more info on this situation, including evidence of messages from other Facebook executives disappearing, please contact this article’s author Josh Constine via open Twitter DMs, josh@techcrunch.com, or encrypted Signal chat at (585)750-5674.

For more on Facebook’s recent troubles, read our feature pieces:

 

blogger better Headline Animator