Facebook deletes 652 fake accounts and pages targeting world politics

According to Facebook, some of the fake Pages, groups and accounts originated in Iran and some in Russia.

International News: Facebook has removed 652 fake accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" that originated in Iran and Russia and targeted people across multiple Internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, Britain and the US.

According to Facebook, some of the fake Pages, groups and accounts originated in Iran and some in Russia.

These sanctions allow companies to provide people Internet services for personal communications, including the government and its affiliates.

"But Facebook takes steps to prevent people in Iran and other sanctioned countries from using our ad tools," said Gleicher.

Also Read: Whatsapp Fake News Controversy

Facebook also removed Pages, groups and accounts that can be linked to sources the US government has previously identified as Russian military intelligence services.

"While these are some of the same bad actors we removed for cybersecurity attacks before the 2016 US election, this more recent activity focused on politics in Syria and Ukraine," Facebook said.

For example, these accounts are associated with Inside Syria Media Centre, which the Atlantic Council and other organisations have identified for covertly spreading pro-Russian and pro-Assad content.

Read Full Story → Facebook Deletes Fake Accounts

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News Source: BS

 

Facebook's biggest one-day stock wipe-out leaves Mark Zuckerberg $15 bn poorer

Of 47 analysts covering Facebook, 43 still rate the stock as "buy", two rate it "hold" and only two rate it "sell".

 

International News → Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's fortune took a more than $15 billion hit on Thursday, as the social media company suffered the biggest one-day wipeout in US stock market history a day after executives forecast years of lower profit margins.

At least 16 brokerages cut their price targets on Facebook after Chief Financial Officer David Wehner startled an otherwise routine call with analysts by saying the company faced a multi-year squeeze on its business margins.

That "bombshell," as one analyst termed it, played into concerns on Wall Street that Facebook's model could be under threat after a year dominated by efforts to head off concerns over privacy and its role in global news flow.

Shares closed down almost 19 per cent at $176.26, wiping more than $120 billion off the company's value or nearly four times the entire market capitalisation of Twitter Inc .

US Stock Market

Slowing revenue growth initially pulled the stock down nearly 9 in after-hours trading on Wednesday before losses picked up on the margin outlook.

"Over the next several years, we would anticipate that our operating margins will trend towards the mid-30s on a percentage basis," Wehner said on a conference call with analysts.

Facebook's margin fell to 44 per cent in the second quarter from 47 per cent a year ago as it spent heavily on security and initiatives to convince users the company was protecting their privacy.

The company also said revenue growth from emerging markets and the company's Instagram app, which has been less affected by privacy concerns, would not be enough to repair the damage.
The impact on the rest of the FAANG group of high-flying tech stocks was marginal.

Read Full Updates → Facebook Share Drop

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News Source : BS

It’s Facebook again: 3 million users data was exposed by myPersonality app

The social media giant on Monday said that is auditing each and every app that has access to the data of its users and has already suspended 200 apps which failed to comply with its policies.

International News : A data set of over 3 million Facebook users collected via a personality app was available to download freely for anyone for almost four years, New Scientist reported. The dataset was collected via the personality quiz app “myPersonality” by academics at the University of Cambridge.

“The data was highly sensitive, revealing personal details of Facebook users, such as the results of psychological tests. “It was meant to be stored and shared anonymously, however such poor precautions were taken that deanonymising would not be hard,” the report said.

The data sets were controlled by David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski at the University of Cambridge. “More than 6 million people completed the tests on the myPersonality app and nearly half agreed to share data from their Facebook profiles with the project,” said the report.

Alexandr Kogan, at the centre of the British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica scandal, was previously part of the project. “Cambridge Analytica had approached the myPersonality app team in 2013 to get access to the data, but was turned down because of its political ambitions,” the report said.

Also Read: Facebook Suspends 200 Apps Over Data Misuse Investigation

Facebook last month suspended “myPersonality” from its platform, saying the app may have violated its policies. The social media giant said that is auditing each and every app that has access to the data of its users and has already suspended 200 apps which failed to comply with its policies.

The company CEO Mark Zuckerberg had promised a thorough investigation and audit into apps that had access to information before Facebook changed its platform policies in 2014 — significantly reducing the data apps could access.

“To date, thousands of apps have been investigated and around 200 have been suspended — pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data,” Facebook said.

If Facebook finds evidence that these or other apps did misuse data, it will ban them and notify users via Help Centre on its website. Appearing before the US Congress in April, Zuckerberg told lawmakers that his own personal data was part of 87 million Facebook users that was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Read More on → Facebook Users Data Leak

Facebook to play matchmaker with new dating service

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced the world’s largest social network will soon include a new dating feature.

 

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced the world’s largest social network will soon include a new facebook dating feature — while vowing to make privacy protection its top priority in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Zuckerberg yesterday unveiled the plans as he addressed Facebook’s annual F8 developers conference in San Jose, California — emphasising that the focus would be on helping people find long-term partners.

“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships, not just hookups,” Zuckerberg said in presenting the new feature, noting that one in three marriages in the US start online — and that some 200 million Facebook users identify as being single.

Under the new feature, users will be able to create a separate “dating” profile not visible to their network of friends, with potential matches recommended based on dating preferences, points in common and mutual acquaintances.

It will be free of charge, in line with Facebook’s core offering.The announcement sent shares in the online dating giant Match.com tumbling, finishing the formal trading day down 22 per cent. The 33-year-old CEO also said the dating offer was built from the ground up with privacy and safety in mind, as he underscored the firm’s commitment to boosting privacy protections.

Facebook’s closely-watched developer conference comes as the giant faces intense global scrutiny over the mass harvesting of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Facebook has admitted up to 87 million users may have had their data hijacked in the scandal, which saw Zuckerberg grilled at length by the US Congress last month.

“We need to make sure that never happens again,” Zuckerberg told the audience, lightening the talk by sharing that friends made on online streaming video watch party at the social network of his hours testifying before Congress.

In a related move, Facebook announced an upcoming feature called “Facebook Clear History” that will allow users to see which apps and websites send the network information, delete the data from their account, and prevent Facebook from storing it. The social network has already moved to limit the amount of data it shares with third-party applications and plans further steps to prevent a repeat of the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook is also reviewing applications overall as well as auditing those that accessed large amounts of data to make sure access isn’t abused, he said. “Security isn’t a problem than you ever fully solve,” Zuckerberg said, outlining the slew of efforts by Facebook to battle election interference, misinformation, spam among other challenges.

Why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is winning the US Senate hearings

The social-media giant’s economic model emerged unscathed despite hours of questions from senators.

International News : Mark Zuckerberg did just fine in his first turn in the Congressional hot seat. He was confident. He capably tackled many of the queries proposed last week by Bloomberg columnists. The 33-year-old billionaire appeared humble throughout much of the hearing, with only a few smug smiles.

The best news for Facebook Inc. the company was that Zuckerberg ably deflected any challenges to the beating heart of its economic model: its hungry data collection and the fine-tuned targeted advertising based on that data. Zuckerberg’s success is a win for anyone primarily concerned with the company’s market value. But it’s a loss for the rest of us.

Facebook will keep failing users’ trust as long as its business is based on unrestrained hoovering of as much user data as possible, and crafting ever-more innovative ways for advertisers to harness that information for commercial goals. It’s an arrangement to which Facebook’s users agree and can sidestep, technically, but it is hardly informed consent or a real option to avoid.

This inherent conflict was on display during two of Mark Zuckerberg‘s exchanges on Tuesday. The first was with Senator Roy Blunt, the Republican from Missouri. He asked Zuckerberg a series of questions about what information the company can collect on its 2 billion users and use for advertising, including whether the social network can pinpoint that a person who posts on Facebook from his work computer in the morning is the same person who uploads a photo to his Facebook smartphone app at night.

The answer, as Zuckerberg surely knows, is yes. Facebook brags to advertisers that it can provide “cross-device” targeting, as it is called. The company can also track people nearly everywhere they go online, and it can see what apps people have installed on their phones.

Facebook also collects information on “offline” activity, as Blunt also asked, which includes information on users’ location as they roam around the real world. Companies can also match their information on what your purchase in stores — that box of cereal at the supermarket, for example — and marry it with Facebook account information. Inexplicably, Zuckerberg tried to say he wasn’t completely sure about Facebook’s data collection policies, and one of his underlings could follow up later. The Facebook CEO knows what his company does, but perhaps he couldn’t acknowledge that his companies relies on assembling detailed dossiers on billions of people.

Read More on  → Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Facebook Scandal: It was my mistake and am sorry, Mark Zuckerberg tells US Senate

Zuckerberg traversed Capitol Hill on Monday surrounded by police and trailed by packs of reporters ahead of his scheduled appearance before three congressional committees.

International; News : Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg placed the blame for privacy and security lapses at the world’s largest social network squarely on himself as he girded on Monday (Apr 9) for appearances this week on Capitol Hill before angry lawmakers.

In prepared remarks released by a congressional panel, Zuckerberg admitted he was too idealistic and failed to grasp how the platform – used by 2 billion people – could be abused and manipulated.

The 33-year-old is to testify before senators on Tuesday and House lawmakers on Wednesday amid a firestorm over the hijacking of data on millions of Facebook users by the British firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with Donald Trump’s campaign.

On Monday, Zuckerberg ditched his trademark T-shirt for a suit and tie as he made the rounds on Capitol Hill with his wife Priscilla for private meetings with lawmakers ahead of the hearings – a key test for the Facebook founder.

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said in his written testimony released by the House commerce committee.

“I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

In his written remarks, Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook “an idealistic and optimistic company” and said: “We focused on all the good that connecting people can bring.”

But he acknowledged that “it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.”

Zuckerberg said he has called for more investments in security that will “significantly impact our profitability going forward,” adding: “I want to be clear about what our priority is: protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profit.”

Cambridge Analytica Scandal: How India can save democracy from Facebook

Hegemonic incumbents like Google and Facebook need to be tackled with regulation; govt should use procurement power to fund open source alternatives.

Cambridge Analytica Scandal : Those that celebrate the big data/artificial intelligence moment claim that traditional approaches to data protection are no longer relevant and therefore must be abandoned. The Cambridge Analytica episode, if anything, demonstrates how wrong they are. The principles of data protection need to be reinvented and weaponized, not discarded. In this article I shall discuss the reinvention of three such data protection principles. Apart from this I shall also briefly explore competition law solutions.

Collect data only if mandated by regulation

• One, data minimization is the principle that requires the data controller to collect data only if mandated to do so by regulation or because it is a prerequisite for providing a functionality. For example, Facebook’s messenger app on Android harvests call records and meta-data, without any consumer facing feature on the app that justifies such collection. Therefore, this is a clear violation of the data minimization principle. One of the ways to reinvent this principle is by borrowing from the best practices around warnings and labels on packaging introduced by the global anti-tobacco campaign. A permanent bar could be required in all apps, stating ‘Facebook holds W number of records across X databases over the time period Y, which totals Z Gb’. Each of these alphabets could be a hyperlink, allowing the user to easily drill down to the individual data record.

Consent must be explicit, informed and voluntary

• Two, the principle of consent requires that the data controller secure explicit, informed and voluntary consent from the data subject unless there are exceptional circumstances. Unfortunately, consent has been reduced to a mockery today through obfuscation by lawyers in verbose “privacy notices” and “terms of services”. To reinvent consent we need to bring ‘Do Not Dial’ registries into the era of big data. A website maintained by the future Indian data protection regulator could allow individuals to check against their unique identifiers (email, phone number, Aadhaar). The website would provide a list of all data controllers that are holding personal information against a particular unique identifier. The data subject should then be able to revoke consent with one-click. Once consent is revoked, the data controller would have to delete all personal information that they hold, unless retention of such information is required under law (for example, in banking law). One-click revocation of consent will make data controllers like Facebook treat data subjects with greater respect.

→ Cambridge Analytica Row ←

Cambridge Analytica Row: Who used stolen data for polls – Congress or BJP?

Ravi Shankar Prasad said, ‘The Congress must explain if it has engaged in data trade with Cambridge Analytica’.

Latest News : The BJP and the Congress accused each other of using the services of embattled data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) that along with Facebook is at the centre of a global row over the alleged unauthorized use of personal data from the social media giant.

As the firestorm over the issue hit India, the government warned Facebook, which is being probed by US and British lawmakers over a potential breach of user confidentiality, of stringent action if any attempt was made to influence the country’s electoral process through “undesirable means”.

However, the company’s India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI) lists the BJP, the Congress and the JD-U as its clients. The India partner is by Amrish Tyagi, son of senior JD-U leader K. C. Tyagi. In media interviews, the junior Tyagi admitted that the Youth Congress in Jharkhand, the BJP and the JD-U had used its services to conduct research.

BJP leader and Union Law and IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad cited media reports to allege that the Congress was using the services of the London-based political data analytics firm for the next Lok Sabha election and boost its president Rahul Gandhi’s social media profile and its outreach.

“The Congress must explain if it has engaged in data trade with Cambridge Analytica,” the minister said.

He said the number of Gandhi’s followers on Twitter had risen recently and wondered if the Congress had used the services of the Cambridge Analytica for this “fake popularity”.

“Will the Congress now depend on data manipulation and theft to woo voters,” Prasad asked.

“These days, there is a lot of news about CA and how it has been involved in data theft, psychometric analysis, data manipulation and subversion of democratic processes. Can the Congress deny that?” he asked.

→ Cambridge Analytica , Cambridge Analytica Row ←

Zuckerbergs lead $50 mn investment in BYJU's

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's investment arm for education and healthcare, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, has made its first investment in Asia in BYJU's, a Bengaluru-based education technology firm.

The $50 million commitment saw funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Sofina and Lightspeed Ventures, and Times Internet. The investment would be used for expansion, BYJU's said in a statement.

Vivian Wu, who manages Zuckerberg's education venture, will join BYJU's board. This is the first investment in Asia from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. It was launched to advance human potential and promote equality and funds non-profit organisations.

"Education can give young people and their families a path to a better future, and families in India work hard to give their children that chance. BYJU's represents an opportunity to help even more students develop a love for learning and unlock their potential," said Vivian Wu.

The BYJU's app has been downloaded more than 5.5 million times and reached 250,000 annual subscribers across India. It has an average engagement rate of 40 minutes per day and 90 per cent of  read more..