Pretty much every single app that you have on your phone sells personal data for profit not just FB. I will give you an example. I know a consultant that instructed the employees of a small company to download a free game. The consultant knew the owners of the free game. A week later the consultant went back to the company. The consultant then started to tell the individual employees some of the following: What time they would wake up in the morning What time they would go to bed What they would eat List of their friends Their interest List of their hobbies What tv shows they like Where they shop etc. This was from a free game. The vast majority of apps gather personal information and use it to make money. Do you actually think that all of those apps are "free"?
Facebook blocked. After years of trying to woo its way into China, Facebook appeared to have been given a break this week. It registered a subsidiary with $30 million capital in Alibaba's hometown, Hangzhou, and announced its intention to build an "innovation centre" in the province. However, hours later, the company's listing disappeared from the register and references to it were partially censored online. Facebook's registration had been quietly revoked. The reversal was reportedly due to a disagreement between the local authorities and the Cyberspace Administration of China, which exerts ultimate control over the arena. New York Times
Facebook Antitrust The head of Germany's federal antitrust authority, Andreas Mundt, said he is "very optimistic" that the watchdog will take action of some kind against Facebook this year. The Federal Cartel Office has found Facebook abused its market dominance to gather data on people without consent. Reuters
Facebook breach hit up to 5M EU users, and it faces up to $1.63B in fines Less than 10 percent of the 50 million users attacked in Facebook’s recent breach lived in the European Union, tweeted the Irish Data Protection Commission, which oversees privacy in the region. Facebook still could be liable for fines if the EU determines it didn’t do enough to protect user security. (TechCrunch)
Facebook Unrest Many Facebook employees have been outraged at the appearance by the company's lobbying chief, Joel Kaplan, in the supporters' gallery behind Brett Kavanaugh at last week's Senate hearing about sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee. Kaplan, a friend of Kavanaugh's, apologized to Facebook staff, but the internal unrest has not quietened down, with some viewing his appearance as a statement that he believed Kavanaugh rather than his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. New York Times
Facebook Metrics Remember a couple years back when Facebook admitted to artificially inflating its metrics for video viewing times? Well, the small advertisers that subsequently sued the social network have now claimed that Facebook knew about its calculation problem more than a year and a half earlier, and did nothing since higher figures would mislead advertisers into thinking Facebook was a hotter video platform than it actually was. Fortune
Facebook confirms it’s building augmented reality glasses The product could be Facebook’s opportunity to own a mainstream computing device on which its software could run after a decade of being beholden to smartphones built, controlled, and taxed by Apple and Google.
Facebook Fine Facebook has failed to convince the British privacy regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), to back down from levying the maximum possible fine against it over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fine is just $645,000, but that's because the offense occurred before the introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation. The ICO's line is that Facebook messed up very badly, and if the GDPR applied it would have received a much larger fine. ICO