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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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NYTimes details how Apple’s privacy focus drove a wedge between Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

With iOS 14.5, which Apple will release today, iPhone owners will have the option to explicitly choose whether to let apps like Facebook track them across other apps. A new profile from the New York Times today elaborates on how Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook became foes due to Apple’s privacy push.

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Facebook launches tool to export posts and notes to Google Docs and more

Facebook today announced a tool to export posts and notes to Google Docs, WordPress.com, and Blogger. This feature is part of the Data Transfer Project launched in 2018 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so all users across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.

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Facebook will tell you if a page is satire, but not if your data was leaked

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Facebook will tell you if a page is satire, as well as if it isn’t, in a new initiative. When a satirical page uses the name of a politician, for example, it will be labeled “Satire Page” to ensure that people don’t mistake it for the real person.

Conversely, posts by politicians will be labeled as “Public Official” …

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Tim Cook to talk Parler, Facebook, and more in Kara Swisher interview on Monday [update: now available]

Tim Cook Apple law Russia

Update: The full podcast interview with Tim Cook and Kara Swisher is now available.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook will give an interview to The New York Times’ Kara Swisher on Monday, according to a tweet by the journalist. In the interview, the two will discuss the right-wing social app Parler and Apple’s feud with Facebook.

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iPhone app privacy analysis shows which apps collect the most personal data

iPhone app privacy

iPhone app privacy labels have been a real eye-opener in showing just how much of our personal data is accessed by certain apps. If you’ve ever wondered which apps collect and share the most data, cloud storage company pCloud did the legwork.

The company examined app privacy labels in the App Store, and compiled a ranking of apps by the percentage of personal data collected, as well as the amount of it passed to third parties…

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