San Francisco, United States | AFP | Facebook said Friday it would add $9 billion to its stock buyback program, which could scoop up shares pummeled over the past few months by privacy scandals and a slump on Wall Street. In a regulatory filing, the leading social network said it …
Read More »Italy fines Facebook for selling users’ data
Rome, Italy | AFP | Italy’s competition authority has fined Facebook 10 million euros ($11.3 million) for selling users’ data without informing them and “aggressively” discouraging users from trying to limit how the company shares their data. Facebook “misleadingly gets people to sign up… without informing them in an immediate …
Read More »Zuckerberg defends Facebook in new data breach controversy
London, United Kingdom | AFP | Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg pushed back Wednesday against emails showing the social media giant offering Netflix and other popular apps preferential access to people’s data even after it had tightened its privacy rules. A British parliamentary committee investigating whether the social media behemoth was …
Read More »Facebook accused of giving access to users’ data
London, United Kingdom | AFP | A British parliamentary committee accused Facebook on Wednesday of giving companies such as Netflix preferential access to users’ data even after it tightened its privacy rules in 2014-15. The UK parliament’s select media committee published more than 200 pages of internal Facebook emails it …
Read More »‘Fix Facebook, whether it wants to or not’
Bruxelles, Belgium | AFP | Eight months after revealing the links between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (CA), whistleblower Christopher Wylie is pushing for the internet giant to be regulated — whether it wants to or not. He is scathing about Facebook’s “man-child” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and the arrogance of …
Read More »Former employee says Facebook failing black people
San Francisco, United States | AFP | A former Facebook employee on Tuesday went public with a memo saying the company is failing to include black people in its workforce and on the social network. Mark Luckie said that he shared the message with all Facebook employees around the world …
Read More »Facebook access hit by unspecified problems
Washington, United States | AFP | Facebook said Tuesday users were having trouble accessing the social network and its other applications such as Instagram, but did not explain the cause of the outages. It was the second instance in the past two weeks in which technical issues appeared to affect …
Read More »THIS WEEK: Stella Nyanzi’s new mission in Luzira prison
THIS WEEK: Stella Nyanzi’s new mission in Luzira prison Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Makerere University researcher and activist Stella Nyanzi declined bail by the Magistrates Court to teach inmates at Luzira prison how to use social media. Nyanzi was charged with cyber harassment and offensive communication after she wrote …
Read More »Facebook denies hiding Russian sabotage, but fires lobbying firm
Washington, United States | AFP | Facebook on Thursday denied allegations in the New York Times that it tried to mislead the public about its knowledge of Russian misinformation ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, but severed links with a Republican consultancy. The Times detailed obfuscation by Facebook’s top …
Read More »Facebook shuts more accounts aimed at political meddling
San Francisco, United States | AFP | Facebook on Tuesday said it shut down more accounts aimed at influencing the US midterm election and that it is exploring a possible link to Russia. “As we’ve continued to investigate, we detected and removed some additional Facebook and Instagram accounts,” head of …
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