Belgian watchdog says Facebook tramples on European privacy laws

The Belgian privacy commission has told Facebook to stop tracking the internet activities of people who have not registered with the site or have logged out, after a “staggering” report showed alleged breaches of EU privacy law. “Facebook tramples on European and Belgian privacy laws”, the data protection authority said in a statement. “Facebook has …

Facebook Agrees To Buy WhatsApp For $19bn

Facebook has agreed to buy the mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19bn (£11.4bn), the social network has announced. The company said in a statement that it would pay $4bn (£2.4bn) in cash and $15bn (£9bn) in Facebook shares as part of the deal. The app’s founders and employees will get $3bn (£1.8bn) of the shares …

Twitter’s Revenue doubled in the fourth quarter but user growth stalls

Twitter Inc. TWTR -0.53%said its user growth slowed in its first quarter as a public company, sending its shares plunging in after-hours trading. Adding to the concern, Twitter’s own advertising metric for gauging usage, “timeline views,” slid for the first time sequentially. The company measures a timeline view every time a user refreshes a page …

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype & Yahoo Hit With Prism Data Protection Complaints In Europe

The European data protection activists behind the Europe v Facebook (evf) campaign group, that has long been a thorn in Facebook’s side in Europe, have filed new complaints under regional data protection law targeting Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo for their alleged collaboration with the NSA’s Prism data collection program. The student activist organisation is targeting the …

Do Google searches for “facebook” mirror African Internet growth trends?

Google Trends Interest over time allows us to view search trends for specific geographic areas by month. Since Facebook use is synonymous with Internet use in the majority of African countries, we’ve attempted to use search interest for the network to make conjectures about the stage of African Internet growth in each African nation. We’ve …