by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : Owing to severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, Facebook is set to cede its long-held second position among the top websites in the US to YouTube, according to a new study.
Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, CNBC reported on Wednesday citing the study by market research firm SimilarWeb.
Facebook earlier reported that in the second quarter of this year, its number of daily active users remained flat in North America and went down in Europe.
Owned by Google parent Alphabet, YouTube, on the other hand, has seen increased traffic and rise in viewership, said the study that found Google’s position as the biggest website in the US remaining unshaken.
The researchers projects that Amazon is set to overtake Yahoo as the fourth most-visited website in the US in the next couple of months.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Investing, Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Facebook has announced to invest an additional $4.5 million towards helping the news industry globally.
The social media giant, that reported more than $5 billion in profit in the second quarter this year, said it will give $3.5 million towards “Facebook Membership Accelerator”, a three-month pilot programme designed to help news organisations with membership models.
“We are going to continue to coach the group of metro news publishers from the pilot programme through the end of this year, and we will reconvene with them in 2019 to focus on subscriber retention,” Campbell Brown, Global Head of News at Facebook, said in a blog post on Thursday.
Facebook also announced to contribute $1 million to the 2018 “NewsMatch” campaign which matches individual donations to more than 100 non-profit newsrooms around the country.
“Last year, ‘NewsMatch’ helped make 2017 a record-breaking year for giving to non-profit journalism and we are excited to help NewsMatch expand in 2018,” said Brown.
The “Facebook Membership Accelerator” will help non-profit news organisations and local, independent publishers with membership models build sustainable businesses, by providing supporters access to exclusive content and experiences through memberships.
An earlier “Local News Subscriptions Accelerator” programme from Facebook was designed to test strategies focused on growing digital subscription acquisitions for local publishers.
“We’re encouraged by the early successes of this programme, and proud of the tangible business results that publishers have accomplished so far,” Brown noted.
Facebook said it is also working with publishers across the US and Europe to test support for subscriptions in “Instant Articles”.
“Moving forward, we’ll also be exploring ways to support emerging models like membership directly on Facebook,” said Brown.
On Thursday, Facebook announced its first partnership in India with Chennai-based Asian School of Journalism (ACJ).
Part of the Facebook Journalism Project, the partnership will establish a scholarship programme at ACJ and support five students in four career specialisations — print, new media, radio and television.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Facing global backlash over the massive Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook stock nosedived 20 per cent — wiping over $120 billion off the company’s market value — after its revenue and user growth in the second quarter of 2018 fell short of investor expectations.
The social media giant late on Wednesday reported 2.23 billion monthly active users (MAUs) — an increase of 11 per cent (year-over-year) which was its slowest growth in more than two years.
Facebook reported revenue of $13.2 billion — a gain of 42 per cent but missing analyst expectation of $13.3 billion. It ended the quarter with $42.3 billion in cash and equivalents.
The social media platform earned $5.1 billion, or $1.74 per share, for the second quarter.
“Our community and business continue to grow quickly. We are committed to investing to keep people safe and secure, and to keep building meaningful new ways to help people connect,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.
The daily active users (DAUs) were 1.47 billion as of June 30, also an increase of 11 per cent year-over-year.
Analysts attributed the slow user growth to the European privacy law that went into effect on May 25.
Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 91 per cent of advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2018 — up from approximately 87 per cent of advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2017.
Facebook currently employs 30,275 people — an increase of 47 per cent year-over-year.
“We expect revenue growth rates to continue to decelerate in the second half,” said David Wehner, Chief Financial Officer.
In April, Facebook had warned investors that more users’ data scandals in the future may adversely affect the social networking giant’s reputation and brand image.
Appearing before the US Congress, Zuckerberg told the lawmakers that his own personal data was part of 87 million users’ that was “improperly shared” with the British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.
After the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook suspended Boston-based data analytics company Crimson Hexagon over concerns that it harvested users’ data.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Social Media, Technology
New Delhi : To help billions of users manage their data and help them transfer that into and out of online services without privacy issues, four tech giants — Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter — on Friday announced to join the open source initiative called Data Transfer Project (DTP).
In the early stages at the moment, the Data Transfer Project will help users of one service to use their data to sign up for another service with encryption.
“Using your data from one service when you sign up for another still isn’t as easy as it should be. Today we’re excited to announce that we’re participating in the Data Transfer Project,” said Steve Satterfield, Privacy and Public Policy Director at Facebook in a statement.
The initiative comes at a time when data-sharing is making headlines — be it the massive Cambridge Analytica data scandal or third-party apps accessing users’ data at various platforms — amid countries announcing new data-protection laws like the European General Data Regulation Protection (GDPR).
Moving data between any two services can be complicated because every service is built differently and uses different types of data that may require unique privacy controls and settings.
“For example, you might use an app where you share photos publicly, a social networking app where you share updates with friends, and a fitness app for tracking your workouts,” said Satterfield.
“These are the kinds of issues the Data Transfer Project will tackle. The Project is in its early stages, and we hope more organisations and experts will get involved,” he added.
The Data Transfer Project uses services’ existing APIs and authorisation mechanisms to access data. It then uses service specific adapters to transfer that data into a common format, and then back into the new service’s API.
According to Google, the project will let users “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it”.
The tech giants also released a white paper on this project.
“The future of portability will need to be more inclusive, flexible, and open. Our hope for this project is that it will enable a connection between any two public-facing product interfaces for importing and exporting data directly,” read the white paper.
According to Damien Kieran, Data Protection Officer at Twitter, right now, much of the online products and services we use do not interact with each other in a coherent and intuitive fashion.
“Information that is housed on one platform cannot be easily and securely transferred to other services. This is not a positive collective experience for the people who use our services and we are keen to work through some of the challenges as an industry,” Twitter said.
The Data Transfer Project was formed in 2017 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, News, Social Media, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : In a landmark ruling when it comes to post-death digital rights, Germany’s highest court has told Facebook to grant a grieving mother access to her late daughter’s account.
Citing data protection laws, Facebook had earlier refused to allow the woman access to the profile of her 15-year-old daughter who was killed by an underground train in Berlin in 2012.
Judges at the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe in southwest Germany ruled on July 12 that “parents can inherit the contract between their child and a social media platform in the same way they would be able to inherit physical documents such as diaries and private letters”.
“From an inheritance law view, there is no reason to treat digital content differently,” the ruling said.
There are over two billion people on Facebook, 1.5 billion on WhatsApp, one billion on Instagram and 330 million on Twitter — out of which millions are from India.
There is no denying the fact that most of us spend a sizable amount of time on digital platforms and few of us actually think what will happen to our digital possessions once we die.
The latest ruling has reignited the debate on how to make digital platforms realise the need to transfer digital assets — personal photos, family videos and friendly posts — to the family once a member is no more.
“When someone dies leaving behind his email and social media accounts, the same are movable property and that being so, any heirs of the concerned person can seek right to access the same,” says Pavan Duggal, one of the nation’s top cyber law experts.
A “digital heir” can preserve those precious moments and gift those to future generations via tools such as an external hard disk, Cloud storage, pen drive or DVDs.
The said heirs can ask the digital/social media companies to get access after giving the necessary proof.
“Invariably, the service provider may not be inclined to give such access without any requisite order from the court of competent jurisdiction. This could mean getting a succession certificate from a court of competent jurisdiction which could be a time-consuming process,” Duggal told IANS.
The German ruling has done justice to a grieving women but the Indian cyber law has not even touched upon — let alone dwelt on the nuances of — the issue of one’s digital life post-death.
“It is pertinent to note that India does not have a dedicated law on digital inheritance, which is indeed unfortunate, given the rapid adoption of and reliance on the digital data by Indians,” Duggal lamented.
Facebook and WhatsApp each has over 200 million Indian users. The photo-sharing app Instagram, according to www.statista.com , has nearly 60 million users in India (as of April 2018).
According to statistician Hachem Sadikki from the University of Massachusetts, Facebook will become the world’s biggest virtual graveyard by the end of this century as there will be more profiles of dead people than of living users.
The social media giants, however, have formulated their own solutions to the problem.
Facebook “memorialises” your account and allows you to choose a “legacy contact”. No one can log into a “memorialised” account.
The “legacy contact” can “manage” your account by adding a pinned post (like a funeral announcement), respond to new friend requests and change the profile picture and cover photo — but nothing beyond that.
Google, which owns Gmail, YouTube and Picasa web albums, has an “Inactive Account Manager” feature which allows a user to nominate who has access to his or her information. If people don’t log on after a while, their accounts can be deleted or shared with a designated person.
According to Twitter, “In the event of the death of a Twitter user, we can work with a person authorised to act on behalf of the estate or with a verified immediate family member of the deceased to have an account deactivated.”
The micro-blogging site, however, says that “we are unable to provide account access to anyone regardless of his or her relationship to the deceased.”
From the security point of view, one has to safeguard digital impressions in case of death so that they are not used for anti-social purposes.
“Digital signatures/impressions generally have a validity/expiry date which require a yearly renewal and they are also equipped with a unique combination of passkey so even if someone has the digital signatures they must know the access key to use that,” noted social media analyst Anoop Mishra.
The law, however, is silent on this not just in India but in other countries too.
Several US states have been debating for years the question of whether families can access someone else’s digital assets after they die.
“The law has to intrinsically recognise that digital data and information, as also aspects pertaining to digital life, are integral components of our life and the law must provide for seamless inheritance of digital data,” Duggal noted.
According to the experts, rather than being allowing the accounts of digital users to lapse, it is imperative that the rights to the digital assets of the dead person be adequately recognised and granted to the relatives of the dead person.
The German ruling has opened a window for other countries to take cognizance and formulate laws that cater to digital inheritance.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
