According to Facebook’s biannual transparency report released this week, government requests for Facebook user data rose 13 percent in the second half of 2015. The number of posts the site censored to comply with local laws around the world also doubled. Facebook received 19,235 requests for user data from the U.S. government, by far the…
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Facebook product manager Melissa Luu-Van wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review this week detailing the company’s unique approach to helping users protect their privacy. Instead of focusing solely on the technological aspect of cyber security, Luu-Van says that Facebook also addresses the “human context” of these problems in three empathetic ways. First, the…
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The school system in Orange County, Florida, renewed a program this week that allows it to spy on students’ social media profiles using monitoring software called SnapTrends. The software, which the school district pays about $18,000 annually to use, “grabs and analyzes” social media messages posted from the district’s campuses. It’s capable of combing through…
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According to Facebook, more than one million people connected to the site in the past month over the secure and private Tor network. Though Tor is often associated with illicit “dark web” activities, it ‘s also a valuable tool for users who want to completely preserve their privacy. The network functions by disguising users’ identify…
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The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled this week that two lawyers accused of spying on a plaintiff’s private Facebook page can be prosecuted for attorney misconduct. The case began in 2007 when a police officer allegedly hit a pedestrian, Dennis Hernandez, with his car. Hernandez claimed he suffered permanent injuries, and sued the police department,…
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised some eyebrows at the company’s annual F8 developer conference last week, appearing to take a veiled shot at Presidential candidate Donald Trump in his keynote speech. “I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others,’” he said. “I hear them calling for blocking free…
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Facebook introduced an Artificial Intelligence-powered auto-tagging feature for video this week at its annual F8 developer conference. The feature will be able to both auto-tag you and your friends, and also log the exact moment they appear in the frame. At the conference, Facebook’s director of applied machine learning Joaquin Quinonero Candela showed an example…
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At its annual F8 developer conference this week, Facebook unveiled plans to introduce chat bots onto its Messenger platform — including bots representing many popular brands. There are already bots on Facebook, but the news this week means that anyone can now make a Messenger bot powered by Facebook’s Bot Engine. This kind of “conversational…
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Facebook vowed last January that it would crack down on hoax news stories with an improved News Feed feature that allowed users to flag them as fake. However, as BuzzFeed News reported this week, these false viral stories are still alive and well on the site. Some of the major fake news distributors, like National…
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A 35-year-old Michigan woman has been charged with a felony for writing derogatory and harassing Facebook posts about a former acquaintance. The charge, one count of unlawfully posting a message, carries up to a two-year prison sentence and $5,000 fine. The accused Facebook harasser, Rene K. Kolka, allegedly began writing posts about the victim last…
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