Facebook Latest Hack Likely Hit 50 Million Users

Friday revealed last Friday that an unknown hacker had breached the site, compromising the accounts of 50 million users. The company’s security team found three bugs were used in the attacks, saying they were used in combination to successfully break into Facebook accounts. What happened? Facebook says its engineering team discovered a security threat that …

Facebook faces more sanctions over ‘misleading’ T&Cs EU warns

Brussels has warned Facebook it will face sanctions unless it changes what the European commission calls its “misleading” terms and conditions. The EU commissioner in charge of consumer protection, Věra Jourová, said she had run out of patience with the social network after nearly two years of discussions aimed at giving Facebook’s European users more …

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp hit by an outage

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp users were in a frenzy after many attempted to log in today only to find that the sites were down. The outage appeared to have affected users around the world, with thousands of reports within the first hour. According to Down Detector, the outages appear to have started around 4:48 p.m. …

UK Regulator fines Facebook $660,000 for Cambridge Analytica scandal

Facebook is to be fined £500,000, the maximum amount possible, for its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the information commissioner has announced. The fine is for two breaches of the Data Protection Act. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded that Facebook failed to safeguard its users’ information and that it failed to be transparent …

Facebook latest glitch inadvertently shared private posts publicly for 14 million users

Facebook yet is again at the center of a fresh privacy controversy after revealing that it had been inadvertently sharing private posts publicly for some 14 million users. The company revealed that when attempting to test a feature on users’ profiles, developers introduced a bug that exposed the posts of some individuals who thought they …

Uganda passes strange law to impose a controversial tax on WhatsApp and Facebook ‘to stop gossip’

Uganda’s parliament has passed a law to impose a controversial tax on people using social media platforms. The new Excise Duty (Amendment) Bill will also impose various other taxes, including a 1% levy on the total value of mobile money transactions – which civil society groups complain will affect poorer Ugandans who rarely use banking …

Facebook culled 583m fake accounts in first quarter 2018

Facebook took moderation action against almost 1.5bn accounts and posts which violated its community standards in the first three months of 2018, the company has revealed. In its first quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook said the overwhelming majority of moderation action was against spam posts and fake accounts: it took action on 837m pieces …