Facebook privacy lapse leaks 400m phone numbers in USA, Britain and Vietnam

Phone numbers linked to more than 400 million Facebook accounts were listed online in the latest privacy lapse for the social media giant, US media reported Wednesday. An exposed server stored 419 million records on users across several databases — including 133 million US accounts, more than 50 million in Vietnam, and 18 million in …

Cold reception to Facebook’s Libra, makes it willing to delay its cryptocurrency for a middle ground with regulators

Facebook is willing to delay its entrance into the cryptocurrency market to work with regulators, Facebook executive David Marcus said in prepared remarks ahead of Congressional hearings on Libra this week. Marcus’ statement is Facebook’s strongest indication yet of its desire to work with regulators on Libra’s development. The company knew Libra might be a …

Study: How Social Media Shed Light on Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis

Over the past two years conflict has escalated in North West and South West Cameroon. Cameroon is a bilingual country (English and French) and these two regions are the country’s English-speaking areas. The conflict started when lawyers and teachers held strikes over the increasing use of French in English courts and schools. Since then, what …

YouTube announces plans to remove thousands of videos and channels to fight extremism

YouTube announced plans on Wednesday to remove thousands of videos and channels that advocate neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies in an attempt to clean up extremism and hate speech on its popular service. The new policy will ban “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion,” …

Sundar Pichai says Google is now thinking privacy first

In a series of sweeping announcements on Tuesday, Google announced it’s unveiling new privacy tools that would, if they lived up to the hype, let users restrict how companies track their online activities and compile and sell their personal data. Speaking at an annual conference for developers on Tuesday, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, delivered …

Terrible idea: Facebook asks some new users for passwords to email for verification

Facebook could be practicing the worst ever user-verification methods that could jeorpadize the security of its users. Generally, social media or any other online service asks users to confirm a secret code or a unique URL sent to the email address they provided for the account registration. However, Facebook has been found asking some newly-registered …

Facebook acknowledges in was privy to Cambridge Analytica concerns before Guardian dossier

Facebook employees were aware of concerns about“improper data-gathering practices” by Cambridge Analytica months before the Guardian first reported, in December 2015, that the political consultancy had obtained data on millions from an academic. The concerns appeared in a court filing by the attorney general for Washington DC and were subsequently confirmed by Facebook. The new …

Facebook suffers severe outage, WhatsApp & Instagram reportedly affected too

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. On Wednesday, people around the world found out when all three services experienced interruptions throughout the day. The company’s main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram were …