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Once again, Facebook has a lot of explaining to do
Just when you thought things couldn't get worse for Facebook, The New York Times has come out with a bombshell exposé of the company's tumultuous last two years. That, of course, includes its handling (er, mishandling) of the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal and other controversies, like the lack of transparency around Russian interference on its site leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. The paper says it spoke with more than 50 people, including current and former Facebook employees, who detailed the company's efforts to contain, deny and deflect negative stories that came its way.
Facebook responds to the New York Times' blockbuster exposé
The New York Times recently published a bruising Facebook report saying, among other things, that the social network knew about Russian interference well before it said, feared Trump supporters and lobbied against critics. The nature of the article stunned even jaded tech observers, but now Facebook has issued a point-by-point rebuttal. It denied that it knew about Russian activity as early as spring of 2016, prevented security chief Alex Stamos from looking into it and that it discouraged employees from using iPhones out of spite for Tim Cook's comments.
Facebook's turmoil has reportedly hit employee morale hard
Facebook has been mired in bad news lately, including numerous data privacy scandals, criticism over its role in Myanmar violence and a tumbling stock price. As such, employee morale has fallen, with just 52 percent of employees saying they're optimistic about Facebook going forward, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's down from 84 percent a year ago, meaning a third of Facebook's employees think the company's future is less than rosy than they did in late 2017.
Facebook reportedly pressured Palmer Luckey to support a politician
When Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey left Facebook, neither said exactly why. The implication that it was due to his quiet donation to a group spreading pro-Trump memes. Now, however, we might have a better idea -- and it raises questions about Facebook's behavior as much as it does Luckey's. The Wall Street Journal has obtained emails and sources indicating that Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, pressured Luckey to publicly support libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson after word of the donation got out. Moreover, Luckey's exit wasn't voluntary. The company placed him on leave and eventually fired him, albeit with an exit package worth "at least" $100 million.
Mark Zuckerberg refuses to testify in the UK yet again
Mark Zuckerberg has yet again rebuked a UK parliamentary request for him to testify. An international committee had called for the Facebook CEO to appear before it later this month.
Facebook is still growing at a slow but steady pace
It feels like for the better part of the past two years, every few months we talk about how Facebook hasn't been having an easy time. In 2018 alone, the company's faced several problems, such as the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal and, of course, the recent data breach that exposed private data of 29 million Facebook users. While we won't see the effects of the latter until next quarter, if at all, Facebook has kept raking in cash and users despite everything -- even if its growth has slowed down a bit. For Q3 2018, Facebook reports it has grown to 2.27 billion monthly active users, a 10 percent year-over-year increase, which is complemented by $13.78 billion in revenue.
With Khashoggi, tech confronts its blood money
In 2015 we laughed at Hacking Team for getting hacked. Their profit-driven facilitation of human rights abuses around the world was somehow barely competent, but notorious. They sold illegal hackware and surveillance tech to brutal regimes and trained them in attacking citizens and journalists. We knew they were evil clowns. We just didn't expect what happened next.
Uber, Google, Facebook: Your experiments have gone too far
It was 2014, around the time when Travis Kalanick referred to Uber as his chick-magnet "Boober" in a GQ article, that I'd realized congestion in San Francisco had gone insane. Before there was Uber, getting across town took about ten minutes by car and there was nowhere to park, ever. With Boober in play, there was parking in places there never were spaces, but the streets were so jammed with empty, one-person "gig economy" cars circling, sitting in bus zones, mowing down bicyclists whilst fussing with their phones, still endlessly going nowhere, alone, that walking across the city was faster.
Facebook hires tarnished UK politician to fix its reputation
These days, all Facebook seems to do is lurch from one public relations crisis to a political one, and back again. Consequently, the company has decided to hire a British former politician, Sir Nick Clegg, as VP of Global Affairs and Communications. Clegg will replace Elliot Shrage, who announced he was stepping down from that role earlier this year.
After Math: Hello Darkness, my old friend
Well, this week lasted years. While we weren't being bludgeoned by the cantankerous Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, we were learning about how 50 million Facebook users had their accounts hacked, that Elon Musk is being sued by the SEC for his Twitter posts (the ones about privatizing Tesla, not the ones wherein he libels a rescue diver), and that Red Dead Redemption 2 will rustle the remainder of your hard drive's free space.
Facebook will never be completely secure
Yesterday, Facebook announced that it found -- and fixed -- a stunning security breach that put 50 million people's accounts at risk. In the words of Facebook executives, the attack was "sophisticated" and its reach was "broad." And, more chillingly, we don't know who was behind it or what they intended to do with that account data.
Hacker says he'll livestream deletion of Zuckerberg's Facebook page (updated)
A white-hat hacker briefly promised to livestream his bid to hack into Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook account on Sunday, September 30th). "Broadcasting the deletion of Facebook founder Zuck's account," Chang Chi-yuan told his 26,000-plus followers on the social network, adding: "Scheduled to go live." By Friday afternoon, the stream had been cancelled.
Facebook hopes to prove AR is more than selfie filters and games
As I sit surrounded by software engineers in a conference room with no natural light, playing augmented reality games on an iPhone, I forget for a second that I'm in Seattle visiting Facebook. Not Amazon or Microsoft. Facebook, a company that's evolved from a simple social network to a full-on technology behemoth. Here, inside the company's largest engineering hub besides its Menlo Park headquarters, Facebook says people are working on many of the projects that will impact its 10-year road map and mission of "bringing the world closer together," including Games, Groups, Messenger and, of course, ads. But I'm here to talk about one particular emerging technology that the company believes will be key to its future: augmented reality.
Zuckerberg says intel-sharing key to halting election meddling
Just days after his op-ed in The Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg has published another lengthy note titled 'Preparing for Elections,' this time via Facebook. In it the Facebook CEO describes his platform's removal of fake accounts ahead of elections in France, Germany, Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil -- along with its takedown of foreign influence campaigns from Russia and Iran targeting the US, UK, and Middle East.
Mark Zuckerberg op-ed describes the election interference 'arms race'
Ahead of Senate hearings that will see Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifying about foreign election interference, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has chimed in via an op-ed in the Washington Post. While we wait to watch the hearings in the morning, you can have a look at his essay, which is mostly a rehash of things we've been hearing about for months in terms of fighting fake accounts, fact checking hoaxes, tracking influence networks and the efforts it has made around elections in France, Germany, Mexico and Italy. Zuckerberg said that Facebook has strengthened its defenses, but it remains to be seen how that will go over with members of Congress and the public. In closing, the CEO said "It's an arms race, and it will take the combined forces of the U.S. private and public sectors to protect America's democracy from outside interference." Whether or not Facebook has done enough, if there are other weak points allowing for misinformation and propaganda -- as researchers found when they were easily able to buy Google ads for Russian troll-inspired material using rubles and known IRA identities -- it may not matter.
Despite scandals, Facebook is still raking in cash and users
It's no secret that 2018 has been quite a rocky year for Facebook, after controversies over the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal and, most recently, its handling of fake news on the platform. But, despite these troubling issues, the company's bottom line hasn't been affected -- it made $12 billion during the last quarter alone. And today, Facebook reported a total revenue of $13.23 billion in Q2 2018, a 42 percent year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, daily and monthly active user numbers are still growing, though they didn't jump by much compared to Q1 2018. Monthly users are now at 2.23 billion, only up 1.54 percent from the last quarter.
Recommended Reading: The accent struggle for Alexa and Google Assistant
The accent gap Drew Harwell, The Washington Post Smart speakers (and the virtual assistants they house) offer voice control for so many connected devices it's hard to keep count. Those audio gadgets can also assist with a range of questions -- that is, if they can understand you. The Washington Post took a close look at the performance of Alexa and Google Assistant when it comes to understanding people with strong accents. The results show that while these devices are certainly handy and increasingly popular, there's still a lot of room for improvement.
Mark Zuckerberg: CEO, billionaire, troll
We imagine the scene at Facebook right now is like Kim Jong-il's funeral. Employees weeping in hallways, dripping anguished snot onto keyboards, beating their chests with unsold Facebook phones in an orgy of anguish at the injustice of media coverage regarding Mark Zuckerberg's unprompted defense this week of giving Holocaust deniers a voice on the platform. But I think we've finally figured out what's going on at Facebook after all.
Senate set to call Cambridge Analytica data leaker to testify
The US Senate Commerce Committee wants to question a former Cambridge Analytica contractor over the Facebook data scandal, reports Reuters. The Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance and Data Security subcommittee is holding a privacy hearing on Tuesday related to Cambridge Analytica, and it will call Aleksandr Kogan to testify, according to the report.
Facebook provides 452-page answer to Congressional questions
Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress was frustrating if you were expecting plenty of immediate answers about Facebook's policies -- he frequently promised follow-ups, and there were questions that went unasked. Facebook is now filling in some of those holes, however. The company has posted responses to questions its CEO didn't answer during the hearings themselves. There's a lot of material to comb through (452 pages' worth without introductions), and not all of it is useful -- some of it is little more than grandstanding. Still, there's already a highlight.
