A treasure trove of Facebook data containing more than 540 million records was exposed online in a public database, security researchers from UpGuard said Wednesday. The data contained extensive details, including people’s comments, likes, names and Facebook IDs. It had been collected by two third-party Facebook apps. Read more: How to Delete Yourself from the Internet …
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When it comes to regulation, Facebook wants some rules. That seems to be the gist of an editorial by Mark Zuckerberg published Saturday in The Washington Post. In it, the head of the world’s largest social network says firms like his have “immense responsibilities” over issues like protecting user data and managing disinformation and political ads on their platforms. But, …
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Facebook can’t seem to get through a week quietly. This week, Germany’s antitrust regulator ordered the world’s largest social network to stop combining data from the Facebook accounts of its German users with information it collects about them from other sites unless they give their OK. The Federal Cartel Office’s order covers not only Facebook’s site, but Instagram, WhatsApp and …
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Mark Zuckerberg says he didn’t set out to build a global company. But a month shy of Facebook’s 15th birthday, the CEO of the world’s biggest social network has found himself defending the behemoth he created. In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday evening, Zuckerberg set out to explain “The Facts About Facebook” and, in particular, …
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Ignorance may be bliss for Facebook‘s users. About 74 percent of adults in the US who use Facebook didn’t know the social network keeps a list of their interests and traits for ad targeting, says a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. About half of Facebook users said they weren’t comfortable that the company compiled this information. The …
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A German antitrust watchdog will order Facebook to stop gathering some user data, according to a report. The Federal Cartel Office, known locally as the Bundeskartellamt, is mainly concerned about the data sharing with apps and sites outside Facebook — including Twitter and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported Sunday. The group’s been investigating Facebook …
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Facebook on Wednesday said it was necessary to grant Spotify and Netflix special access to users’ private messages to enable integration of messaging features. The social media giant said in a blog post that experimental features no longer offered required granting read/write access to the companies. The blog post comes a day after The New York Times reported that Facebook …
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Facebook gave some of the tech industry’s biggest companies greater access to users’ personal data than the social-networking company previously disclosed, The New York Times reported Tuesday. Special arrangements detailed in internal Facebook documents gave Microsoft’s Bing search engine access to the names of all Facebook users’ friends without consent and allowed Netflix and Spotify to read Facebook users’ private …
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Italy’s Competition Authority on Friday slapped Facebook with two fines that total 10 million euros ($11.4M) for using people’s data for commercial purposes in ways that break the country’s laws. Italy issued the first fine after deciding that the social network persuaded people to register for accounts on the platform without informing them during the signup process that their data …
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Facebook isn’t just a social network for posting vacation photos or cat videos. It’s a multibillion dollar ad business. On Wednesday, internal Facebook emails and documents released by UK lawmakers provided a rare glimpse into the methods the social network explored to make money from the user data it’s collected over the years from all of our activity on it. …
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