Facebook

As rumors of Apple’s plans to create AR and VR products intensify, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins The Information 411 podcast this week to talk about Facebook’s own interest in AR and VR. Zuckerberg made it through the interview without mentioning Apple by name — but the icy relationship between the two companies was clear in multiple comments from the Facebook CEO.

A new report from The Wall Street Journal today says that India’s movement has “threatened to jail employees” of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. This comes as the rift between India officials and social media companies continues to grow.

Users who have an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Mac can interact with Siri without even touching the device by using the voice command “Hey Siri,” which invokes Apple’s virtual assistant. As other assistants like Amazon’s Alexa also have similar commands, Facebook is now introducing a new, “Hey Facebook” wake word for its own smart devices.

Facebook continues to play defense against Apple’s upcoming App Tracking Transparency feature. The company has today launched a new digital ad campaign called “Good Ideas Deserve to be Found,” with the purpose of explaining the importance of personalized advertisements.

The world is full of good ideas. Now, thanks to personalized ads, small businesses can get theirs found. Good ideas deserve to be found.

As the battle between Facebook and Apple intensifies, The Wall Street Journal is out with a new report this morning detailing Facebook’s anger at Apple. The report explains that one of the turning points in the battle was an interview Tim Cook did in 2018 amid Facebook’s Cambridge Analytics scandal.

A new scoop from The Information this afternoon shares details about Facebook developing an Apple Watch competitor with a focus on health and messaging. The possible smartwatch launch from the social media giant could happen as soon as 2022.

We’ve seen an increasingly heated Apple versus Facebook battle over the upcoming App Tracking Transparency feature, which will require apps to seek permission to capture data that can be used to deliver personalized ads.

Facebook has claimed that the change will hurt small businesses by making their ads much less effective. But a piece in the Harvard Business Review says that this is misleading …

The battle between Facebook and Apple over the upcoming iOS 14 ad tracking transparency (ATT) feature is ramping up. Starting today, Facebook will begin testing its own prompts asking users to allow app and website tracking. That comes ahead of Apple officially rolling the feature out in “early spring” that will give highlight what apps and websites are tracking them and the ability to easily opt-out.

Speaking at the EU data protection conference CPDP today, Tim Cook gave the opening keynote with his talk entitled “A path to empowering user choice and boosting user trust in advertising.” Cook covered Apple’s concerns about privacy and security in the technology industry, the hope it sees for change going forward, what it is doing to protect privacy, its deep concerns and consequences with Facebook’s business model, and much more.

Facebook is reportedly planning to take its long-running battle with Apple to the courts. The Information reports that Facebook has been working with outside legal counsel to prepare an antitrust lawsuit against Apple alleging that the company “abused its power in the smartphone market by forcing app developers to abide by App Store rules that Apple’s own apps don’t have to follow.”

Mark Zuckerberg can’t keep Apple out of his head. While Apple pushes more aggressive customer privacy protection features on its platform, the Facebook CEO is decrying Apple’s efforts as competitive interference with the social network.

If you woke up this morning and were inexplicably logged out of the Facebook app on your iPhone, you’re not alone. Facebook says that a “configuration change” affected people’s ability to access the Facebook app on their iPhone on Friday evening, but the issue appears to have since been resolved for most users.

Facebook today announced a major update to its Automatic Alt Text (AAT) system, which automatically generates photo descriptions for people with visual impairments. Based on AI, the system can now recognize 10 times more objects and scenes in photos shared on Facebook and also Instagram, providing detailed descriptions for screen readers like Apple’s VoiceOver.

WhatsApp has announced that it is delaying a controversial and confusing change to its privacy policy. A new WhatsApp privacy policy was slated to go into effect in February, but the Facebook-owned company now says it will delay the change for three months.

“There’s been a lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts,” the company writes in the blog post.

Facebook has offered tools to download your information and understand what details the platform has about your for a while now. But now amid more privacy pressure than ever, the company is launching a redesigned “Access Your Information” tool for iOS and Android to make it easier to view and download all these details.

Facebook continues to panic about upcoming privacy changes in iOS 14. The company has sent a new email to businesses today informing them that it has no choice but to comply with the iOS 14 App Tracking Transparency feature. Otherwise, Apple could remove Facebook from the App Store completely.

Facebook is out today with a major update to Facebook Pages that includes removing “Likes,” an all-new layout for the UI, a dedicated News Feed, simpler navigation, refreshed admin controls for partial or full privileges, new insights as well as safety and integrity features.

WhatsApp will shortly start to share your data with Facebook as a condition of use of the app. This completes a U-turn which began when Facebook first acquired the app back in 2014.

At the time, WhatsApp assured users that their data would remain private, and not be shared with Facebook …