At first blush, privacy and antitrust might seem like separate issues—two different chapters in a textbook about big tech. But the decline in Facebook’s privacy protections plays a central role in the states’ case. Antitrust is a complicated field built on a simple premise: When a company doesn’t face real competition, it will be free to do bad things.
a conceptual breakthrough on that front. In a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” the legal scholar Dina Srinivasan argued that Facebook’s takeover of the social networking market has inflicted a very specific harm on consumers: It has forced them to accept ever worse privacy settings. Facebook, Srinivasan pointed out, began its existence in 2004 by differentiating itself on privacy. Unlike then-dominant MySpace, for example, where profiles were visible to anyone by default, Facebook profiles could be seen only by your friends or people at the same school
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Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
South Korea’s information watchdog on Wednesday fined Facebook Inc. 6.7 billion won (US$6 million) for passing information of at least 3.3 million South Koreans to other companies in its first crackdown on the U.S. tech giant.
The recently published report “Free to Be Online?” by Plan International found that more than half of the 14,000 girls and young women surveyed worldwide have experienced online harassment or abuse.
the Bannon-related pages tended to publish content at the same time and linked to the Populist Press, an even more right-wing Drudge Report copycat trafficking in disproven election fraud claims.
“If 2016 was an accident,” Quran added, “2020 has been negligence.”
Some 16.9 million referrals were made by US tech firms to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year, including 69 million images of children being abused – up 50% on the previous year.
Some 94% of the reports, which include the worst category of images, came from Facebook
the National Crime Agency (NCA) has warned the number could drop to zero if Facebook presses ahead with end-to-end encryption.
“The end-to-end encryption model that’s being proposed takes out of the game one of the most successful ways for us to identify leads, and that layers on more complexity to our investigations, our digital media, our digital forensics, our profiling of individuals and our live intelligence leads, which allow us to identify victims and safeguard them.
Beyond thrilled to finally share a sneak peek of our Facebook partnership with Ray-Ban! Our first smart glasses will launch next year, and that’s just the beginning… The future will be a classic and it’s coming in 2021 😎 pic.twitter.com/l9992ZQGoy
Critics of Facebook and Twitter — and even some people inside the companies — say dramatic action is needed to counter the way the platforms supercharge false, and sometimes dangerous, claims.
On social media, it is easy for rumors to go viral, while efforts to fact check or correct those rumors often lag behind.
Part of the reason these claims spread so widely on Facebook, in particular, is that the world’s biggest social network rewards engagement. Posts that get lots of shares, comments and likes get shown to more people, quickly amplifying their reach.
Facebook is well aware of its power to make stories go viral. As the fire rumors proliferated, the company put warnings on some posts its fact checkers had found false and reduced their distribution.
Police monitored RSVP lists on Facebook events, shared information about Slack channels protesters were using, and cited protesters’ posts in encrypted messaging apps like Telegram.
How police used social media to track protesters
warning sent to police departments on June 6, the FBI says it’s been tracking “individuals using Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram” who post about organizing protests.