Skip to main content

Facebook

See All Stories

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.

Chart provided by TradingView

META Chart by TradingView

Telegram benefits from what is said to be Facebook’s most severe global outage

Facebook outage the most severe one ever

The BBC suggests that yesterday’s Facebook outage – which also impacted Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram – was the most severe one ever experienced by the company.

Facebook appears to be recovering from a more than 14-hour disruption to all of its products that left them mostly inaccessible across the world. The company’s main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram were all affected […]

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150m users – compared with around 2.3bn monthly users today.

There have been conflicting reports on the reason for the failure …


Expand
Expanding
Close

Mark Zuckerberg pushing encrypted Messenger and ephemeral Stories to brand Facebook ‘privacy’

Facebook earnings

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, outlined a detailed vision for the future of the social media platform today, 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.


Expand
Expanding
Close

Second problem found with Facebook 2FA security: phone numbers are searchable

Second problem with Facebook 2FA identified

We always recommend that people take advantage of two-factor authentication (2FA) to protect online accounts, but a second problem with Facebook 2FA has now been discovered.

The company last year admitted that it used 2FA phone numbers for ad targeting, and it has now been revealed that it also makes your phone number searchable – and you cannot fully opt out …


Expand
Expanding
Close

Investigation into at least 11 iOS apps sending sensitive data to Facebook, inc sexual activity

11 popular apps sending sensitive data to facebook

A New York regulator has written to Facebook and the developers behind at least 11 popular iPhone apps found to be sending sensitive data to Facebook, to demand an explanation.

This data included things like weight, BMI, menstrual cycles, alcohol consumption, food consumption, heart-rate, blood pressure and calories burned during exercise – including in one case the category ‘sexual activity’ …


Expand
Expanding
Close

Facebook

Facebook still planning ‘clear history’ feature to address user privacy concerns

Facebook has shared today that its previously announced “clear history” feature is set to be released sometime this year. It will allow users to see all the apps and websites they’ve interacted with and delete the data. Facebook will also begin allowing users to stop the platform from recording such data moving forward.


Expand
Expanding
Close

Popular apps caught secretly sending health data and more to Facebook, should Apple intervene?

Facebook privacy apps

A new investigative report from The Wall Street Journal today looks into the controversial practice of popular third-party iOS and Android apps sending very personal user data to Facebook. In some cases, this happened immediately after an app recorded new data, even if the user wasn’t logged into Facebook or wasn’t a Facebook user at all. Notably, the report highlights that Apple and Google don’t require apps to divulge all the partners that user data is shared with.


Expand
Expanding
Close

Facebook says Apple has restored its access to enterprise certificates, bringing internal apps back online

Facebook addiction

Update: In a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider, Facebook continues to defend its Research app, as well as its decision to distribute it via enterprise certificates. Read the details below.

In a new statement today, Facebook says that Apple has restored its access to enterprise certificates. This means that Facebook can now use its internal applications again, which were rendered useless earlier this week when Apple barred the company’s access to enterprise certification.


Expand
Expanding
Close

Zuckerberg says merging WhatsApp, Instagram & Messenger chats will improve security, create an iMessage-like experience

WhatsApp alternatives

A report last week suggested that Facebook is planning to combine Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram messaging into a single, unified platform. During Facebook’s Q4 2018 earnings call this evening, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that this is something the company is considering but said it’s not happening this year.


Expand
Expanding
Close