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995 'Facebook' stories December 2010 - August 2019
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Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018

Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018. It also averages 1.52 billion daily active users as of December 2018.

Facebook was launched in February of 2004 (as The Facebook) for college students and then rapidly grew as it opened the service to more than those with a .edu email address. It was the subject of the 2010 movie called “The Social Network“.

In 2012, the social media giant offered its IPO and Facebook earned the title of the fastest company to grow to $250 billion market capitalization in the S&P 500.

In recent years, the company has been at the center of attention related to its role in the Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Since then, it’s been a continual stream of negative news for the company. They recently had all of their enterprise certificates for iOS revoked after it was discovered they had repackaged Onavo VPN as a ‘Research’ app and were paying teens $20/month to sneakily sideload it.

In early 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a “privacy shift” for the company. He outlined a detailed vision for the future of the social media platform, specifically its messaging services. Notably, in contrast to how the company operates today, he says the future of the platform will be privacy-focused with features like end-to-end encryption, interoperability between its various apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reducing how long it holds data, secure storage of personal data, and more.

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Facebook dark mode in testing, after it was promised earlier this year

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Aug 13 2019 - 4:19 am PT
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Facebook dark mode in testing

Facebook dark mode has been one of the most frequent requests from app users, with the company promising it earlier this year, and it seems it is now in testing.

As with many unannounced tests in social media apps, it was discovered by computer science student Jane Manchun Wong digging into the code. It was Wong who recently spotted a “snooze” feature in Twitter that allows users to temporarily silence notifications…


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Report: iOS 13 to limit VoIP API for apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, eliminate background activity

Avatar for Michael Potuck Aug 6 2019 - 11:23 am PT
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Apple privacy

A new report today from The Information details a change coming with iOS 13 that will force WhatsApp and others to redesign their messaging apps. The small but notable change has to do with how third-party apps use iOS to make internet voice calls with the PushKit VoIP API and also run in the background which will be restricted come this fall.


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$5B Facebook fine could be confirmed this week, but won’t be the end of it

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Jul 23 2019 - 4:10 am PT
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Facebook fine won't be the end of it

A report today says that a rumored $5 billion Facebook fine could be confirmed this week, with the U.S. Department of Justice signing off on the proposal by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The FTC reportedly plans to fine Facebook $5 billion — the largest penalty ever imposed on a company — for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other privacy breaches…


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Comment: My kids aren’t getting social media accounts and yours probably shouldn’t either

Avatar for Bradley C Jul 7 2019 - 6:00 am PT
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A few weeks ago, I got asked by a local church to talk to their parents about strategies to help monitor their kids’ social media use. This topic is one I get asked about a lot, and I know that a lot of parents are struggling with it. When they brought me up there, they were looking for a silver bullet of an app, service, or method to use to help make sure their kids don’t get into trouble on social media. I started the talk with a simple statement: your kids don’t need social media accounts and you don’t either.


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Facebook app banned by Apple hoovered up data from 187k users first

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Jun 13 2019 - 4:47 am PT
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Facebook app banned by Apple got data from 187k users

A sketchy Facebook app banned by Apple earlier this year succeeded in collecting large amounts of personal data from around 187,000 users before it was pulled. Originally named Onavo, it was later rebranded Facebook Research.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked Facebook to provide the numbers, including a breakdown of how many of the users were teenagers …


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Poll: Is the permanent social Internet dying? Should it?

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy May 20 2019 - 4:52 am PT
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Is the permanent social Internet dying?

New York Times staff writer Mike Isaac has written a blog post in which he argues that ‘the permanent social internet is dying.’ That we are increasingly abandoning platforms and formats that create a permanent record of our posts.

As facebook matured, we discovered the unintended consequences of living a life online. An errant, ignorant tweet from our teenage years can get us fired—or worse, canceled. Our parents could have created an entire instagram dedicated to our poopy-diaped years without our knowledge or express consent. Forget running for office if you’ve ever tweeted about, like, anything …


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‘View as Public’ option for Facebook users live again after major vulnerability last year

Avatar for Michael Potuck May 14 2019 - 10:38 am PT
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Facebook

Last fall, Facebook discovered a major flaw with its “View as” feature which saw security tokens for 50 million accounts stolen. Facebook has today announced its security review of the incident is complete and has brought back the View as Public feature in addition to adding a quick button to “Edit Public Details.”


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