Facebook is lobbying hard for the European Commission not to pass some proposed online privacy legislation. These measures could further hurt Facebook’s presence in Europe, coming in the wake of several battles with privacy groups about facial recognition technology.  This is a large market for Facebook, and one they will be fighting hard to protect.…

Facebook is facing allegations of improperly charging advertisers for invalid clicks in a California federal appeals court. The site has already won a ruling denying class action status at the district level. “With respect to the lawsuit challenging our click filters, despite more than two years of discovery, the plaintiffs were unable to identify a…

Police in Queensland, Australia had over 5,000 cases last year that, in some way, involved Facebook. That is a 50 percent increase from the previous year, and it points to a growing link between the social media site and real life crimes. Much has been written about how Facebook is being used by law enforcement…

Facebook has just introduced a new feature in their registration process to educate new users about proper online privacy. The tutorial teaches new users how to control the privacy settings on their posts, and how ads and apps work. Most importantly, the feature added in-line privacy controls, so users can adjust their settings on the…

A new iPhone app called Badabing automatically scans through the tagged photos and albums of up to five of your Facebook friends and pulls out scantily-clad pictures of them. The app uses the same recognition technology as Facebook’s facial recognition capabilities, except Badabing is trained to look for the shape of a bikini. That’s right:…

As evidenced by its recent milestone of 1 billion users, Facebook is one of the fastest growing social networks in the world. It is expanding the quickest in countries like Indonesia, a country of 240 million where there are already 50 million Facebook users. However, many users in Indonesia are teenagers who don’t know how…

A Bulgarian blogger, Bogomil Shopov, wrote in a post on Tuesday that he had purchased a spreadsheet containing about 1.1 million email addresses from Facebook users. He purchased this info on the site Gigbucks from a user named “mertem” who claimed to have gotten the info from Facebook apps. This obviously represents a gross violation of Facebook’s privacy policies, so they…

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has put guidelines in place for companies looking to use facial recognition technology for commercial purposes. You can read the complete report here. Facebook, perhaps the best-known fan of the technology, uses it to make tag recommendations when users upload photos to the platform.  The FTC’s guidelines are not law,…

Facebook recently donated a quarter of a million dollars to the Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  The donated funds were recovered from spammers by Facebook. The center had worked to identify and help stop the creators of the social media botnet Koobface as well as…

Facebook launched a new page on Thursday in its Family Safety Center that’s dedicated to preventing cyber bullying and educating users about its risks. October is National Bullying Awareness Month, and in the wake of the recent Amanda Todd tragedy, Facebook’s timing with the new page could not have been better. In March of last…