by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Social Media, Technology
London : The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has warned Facebook over its planned integration of its chat services — WhatsApp, Messenger and photo-sharing app Instagram, asking the social media giant to provide it with an “urgent briefing” on the proposals.
In a statement, the Dublin-headquartered Irish watchdog said it understood the plan was at a “very early conceptual stage”.
“While we understand that Facebook’s proposal to integrate the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms is at a very early conceptual stage of development, the Irish DPC has asked Facebook Ireland for an urgent briefing on what is being proposed,” the watchdog said in a statement late on Monday.
“The Irish DPC will be very closely scrutinising Facebook’s plans as they develop, particularly insofar as they involve the sharing and merging of personal data between different Facebook companies,” it added.
The New York Times reported on January 25 that all of the three Facebook apps will support end-to-end encryption but the company was yet to provide a timeline for when this will happen.
Messenger and Instagram would continue to operate as stand-alone apps.
According to the Irish watchdog, “previous proposals to share data between Facebook companies have given rise to significant data protection concerns and the Irish DPC will be seeking early assurances that all such concerns will be fully taken into account by Facebook in further developing this proposal”.
“It must be emphasised that ultimately the proposed integration can only occur in the EU if it is capable of meeting all of the requirements of the GDPR,” the statement read.
The move could let the social networking giant tout higher user engagement to advertisers, thus, ramping up its advertising division at a time when overall growth has slowed down.
Facebook has the most users of any other social media platform, and by combining its assets this way, the company could more directly compete with Apple’s iMessage and Google’s messaging services, according to The Verge.
WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption — the hallmark of users’ security — may also go for a toss if Facebook integrates the popular mobile messaging platform with not-that-secure Instagram and Messenger.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
Mark Zuckerberg
San Francisco : Saying goodbye to one of his toughest years filled with several controversies, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he is “proud” of the progress in 2018 and the company has now established multi-year plans to overhaul its systems and is executing those roadmaps.
In a year-end note on Friday, the 34-year-old Zuckerberg said his personal challenge has been to focus on preventing election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation, making sure people have control of their information and ensuring his services improve people’s well-being.
This, however, does not mean Facebook will catch every bad actor or piece of bad content on its platform, he said.
“To be clear, addressing these issues is more than a one-year challenge. For some of these issues, like election interference or harmful speech, the problems can never be fully solved,” the Facebook CEO lamented.
“But we’ve now established multi-year plans to overhaul our systems and we’re well into executing those roadmaps,” added Zuckerberg who faced intense scrutiny over Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018.
Scandals surrounding Facebook started surfacing in such higher frequencies that industry observers began questioning if the social media giant with over two billion users would be able to survive in the long term.
Leading the charge of the attack on Internet “monopolies” was American billionaire investor George Soros, who warned that social media companies can have adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy and that the days of the US-based IT giants were numbered.
Scrutiny of Facebook increased manifold since it revealed earlier in 2018 how a London-based political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, that worked for US President Donald Trump’s campaign, improperly got access to data of up to 87 million users.
Appearing before a US Congress Committee in April, Zuckerberg apologised for the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal.
“We’re a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We’ve fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services,” the Facebook CEO stressed.
“We now have more than 30,000 people working on safety and invest billions of dollars in security yearly,” he added.
In May, he appeared before the European Parliament to respond to questions surrounding the company’s business practices, its plans on fighting misinformation on the platform and protecting user privacy among others.
“For preventing election interference, we’ve improved our systems for identifying the fake accounts and coordinated information campaigns that account for much of the interference — now removing millions of fake accounts every day,” said Zuckerberg in the year-end note.
“For stopping the spread of harmful content, we’ve built AI systems to automatically identify and remove content related to terrorism, hate speech, and more before anyone even sees it,” he said, adding that these systems take down 99 per cent of the terrorist-related content before anyone even reports it.
More than two billion people use one of Facebook services every day.
“People have come together using these tools to raise more than $1 billion for causes and to find more than 1 million new jobs. More than 90 million small businesses use our tools, and more than half say they’ve hired more people because of them,” said Zuckerberg.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : With efforts to reform a European Union tax law not bringing the desired results, France is going to introduce from January 1, 2019 a digital tax on technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, the media reported.
The French government’s “GAFA” tax” is being introduced to combat attempts by the firms to avoid paying what is considered a “fair share” of taxes in the country, by taking advantage of European tax laws, Appleinsider reported on Monday.
The new tax regime is expected to bring in an estimated 500 million euro ($570 million) to the country’s cofferes for 2019, according to French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, The Local Fr said in a report.
Major technology companies have come under the scrutiny of lawmakers in countries like France and Britain for allegedly routing profits through operations in countries with extremely low tax rates or other arrangements.
Earlier this year, the European Commission published proposals for a three per cent tax on the revenues of major tech companies with global revenues above 750 million euro a year and taxable EU revenue above 50 million euro, the BBC reported.
But to become law, EU tax reforms need the support of all member states. And some countries, including Ireland, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Finland are yet to come on board to bring the reforms.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Yair Netanyahu
Tel Aviv : Facebook temporarily banned Yair Netanyahu, son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for posting anti-Muslim posts, the media reported on Monday.
According to a report in The Times of Israel, Yair’s Facebook account was blocked for 24 hours on Sunday after he called for “avenging the deaths” of two Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers who were killed at the West Bank shooting last week.
“Unbelievable. Facebook blocks me for 24 hours for simply criticizing it! Thought police,” Yari wrote on Twitter.
Facebook is yet to comment on this.
After the controversial Facebook post was removed, he wrote that the social media giant was “trying to shut our mouths in the only place where we have the right to express our opinions”.
Yari also posted a screenshot of the original post along with new posts criticising Facebook.
“Do you know where there are no terror attacks? In Iceland and Japan. Coincidentally there’s also no Muslim population there,” he posted.
This is not the first time Yair has been in the spotlight.
According to The Jerusalem Post, in 2017, Yair posted a diagram featuring antisemitic tropes such as Jewish billionaire George Soros, who funds left-wing causes and organizations in several countries.
“The post depicted Soros controlling the world via other conspiracy theory figures like lizard people, known as Reptilians, and the Illuminati or Freemasons,” the report added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology, World
Canberra : The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on Monday proposed measures to counter the dominant market positions of Google and Facebook and strengthen monitoring on their access to information, advertising and consumers personal data.
The regulatory body, which recommended 11 preliminary measures in the report, was directed to conduct a public inquiry into the impact of digital search engines, social media platforms and other digital content in 2017 by then treasurer and current Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
“Acting as an intermediary between consumers and news outlets, platforms are inherently influential in shaping consumers’ choices of digital journalism,” said the report cited by Efe news.
This influential position and filtration of news items could place the consumer in a so-called filter bubble, increasing the risk of consumers being exposed to unreliable news, according to the report.
“The algorithms operated by each of Google and Facebook, as well as other policies, determine which content is surfaced and displayed to consumers in news feed and search results,” it said.
“The ACCC considers that the strong market position of digital platforms like Google and Facebook justifies a greater level of regulatory oversight,” Chair Rod Sims said.
The commission called for the creation of a regulatory authority with powers to monitor these digital platforms and recommended establishing an automatic mechanism to take down content that violates copyright.
The ACCC said consumers should be informed about the manner in which these platforms collect and use their data to create personalized advertising.
This would include a reform of privacy laws to require the user’s express consent to data collection and “enable consumers to require erasure of their personal information where they have withdrawn their consent”.
ACCC said that it found that “competition may have been distorted in multiple sectors where consumer data is used”.
Facebook has 17 million monthly users in Australia — 68 per cent of its population — while Instagram, second most popular site in terms of users – which is owned by Facebook, has 11 million users.
In 2017, Google registered 90 per cent of search traffic originating from Australian desktops and 98 per cent from mobile phones.
—IANS
