by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Medium Enterprise, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : You may soon login to Facebook with Blockchain-based authentication, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has indicated.
In a public interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain late on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said he is “potentially interested” in putting the Facebook login on the Blockchain technology.
“I’m thinking about going back to decentralised or Blockchain authentication. Although I haven’t figured out a way to make this work out but this is around authentication and basically granting access to your information and to different services,” Zuckerberg told Zittrain.
According to him, Blockchain could give users more powers when granting data access to third-party apps.
Facebook last year promoted one of its senior engineers Evan Cheng as the Director of Engineering at its recently launched Blockchain division.
Earlier in May, Facebook set up a group within the company to explore Blockchain technology and its potential use for the platform, headed by Messenger chief David Marcus.
Media reports also said Facebook was exploring to develop its own cryptocurrency.
Facebook has over 2.3 billion users globally and launching cryptocurrency will allow them make payments using a virtual currency like Bitcoin.
In a statement, Facebook said: “Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of Blockchain technology”.
According to The Verge, the risk of further data-sharing scandals is one of the main reasons why Facebook is wary of implementing the change.
“You basically take your information, you store it on some decentralised system and you have the choice of whether to log in different places and you’re not going through an intermediary. There’s a lot of things that I think would be quite attractive about that,” said Zuckerberg.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : Facebook will now incentivise its 36,000 employees on how they are contributing to social causes and helping the company tackle issues like spread of misinformation and hate speech on its platform.
Going beyond metrics like user growth and product quality to decide on employee bonuses, the social media giant will now see how the workers reflect the company’s updated priorities for 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a meeting at his headquarters on Tuesday, a day after Facebook celebrated its 15th anniversary.
“Previously, Facebook’s employee bonus formula was based on six factors, including user growth, increased sharing by users, and improvements in product quality. Now the company is adjusting its bonus calculations to better reflect its updated goals,” said a Fortune report.
Those updated goals include making progress on the social issues Facebook is facing, building services that improve people’s lives, supporting businesses and being more transparent about the role Facebook plays in the world.
“Over the past two years, we’ve fundamentally changed how we run Facebook. This particular change is designed to ensure that we are incentivising people to keep making progress on the major social issues facing the internet and our company,” the company said in a statement.
Zuckerberg in his New Year statement had said that his personal challenge for 2019 will be to “host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society — the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties”.
“We’ve fundamentally changed how we run our company to focus on the biggest social issues, and we’re investing more to build new and inspiring ways for people to connect,” he said after Facebook on January 30 announced record revenue of $16.91 billion in the fourth quarter ending December 31.
Facebook now has a monthly active user base of 2.32 billion and daily active users base of 1.52 billion.
—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 | Business, Markets, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : After facing the flak from different quarters including governments around the world over the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now faced angry shareholders for unequal voting shares, the media reported.
At the company’s annual meeting on Thursday, activist investors had forced votes on six proposals to change the company’s governance or institute other reforms, the Guardian reported.
But thanks to the company’s unequal voting structure, Zuckerberg and his board of directors escaped the election unscathed.
The event, however, provided a platform for crticising the leadership of Zuckerberg and his board of directors.
One of the attendees in the meeting, Christine Jantz of Northstar Asset Management,
Advertisement talked in favour of a proposal to reform Facebook’s stockholder voting structure.
Under the company’s current structure, Zuckerberg controls the majority of voting shares despite not owning a majority of the company.
This is because his shares have 10 times the voting power of the shares available to regular investors.
Problems like the Cambridge Analytica scandal were the results of that structure, according to Jantz.
He called it an “egregious example of when a board is formed by a CEO to meet his needs” rather than those of investors.
James McRitchie, a shareholder activist, termed the current voting structure a “corporate dictatorship”.
“Mr Zuckerberg, take a page from history,” he was quoted as saying.
“Emulate George Washington, not Vladimir Putin,” he added.
The meeting also discussed the company’s various initiatives to increase advertising transparency, improve content moderation, and prevent interference in elections, the report said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
London : Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has no plans as of now to face members of a British parliamentary committee probing the misuse of the firm’s data its practice of collecting user information, the media reported.
In a letter to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Rebecca Stimson, Facebook’s Head of Public Policy in the UK, said that “Zuckerberg has no plans to meet with the committee or travel to the UK at the present time”, theregister.co.uk reported on Tuesday.
The committee had expressed dissatisfaction with Facebook’s response to various points it raised including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect, the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across the web and budgets for investigations.
Stimson’s letter, however, did not dampen the desire of the committee to hear from Zuckerberg directly.
“Although Facebook says Zuckerberg has no plans to travel to the UK, we would also be open to taking his evidence by video link, if that would be the only way to do this during the period of our inquiry,” said Chair of the Committee Damian Collins in response to Stimson’s letter.
“For too long these companies have gone unchallenged in their business practices, and only under public pressure from this Committee and others have they begun to fully cooperate with our requests,” Collins added.
The committee issued Facebook 39 questions it said the firm’s Chief technology Officer Mike Schroepfer had failed to answer in his evidence to the parliamentarians.
The committee said Facebook’s latest responses to these questions do not fully answer each point with sufficient detail or data evidence.
The committee said it plans to write again to address significant gaps in Facebook’s answers in the coming days.
“It is disappointing that a company with the resources of Facebook chooses not to provide a sufficient level of detail and transparency on various points including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect, the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across the web, budgets for investigations, and that shows general discrepancies between Schroepfer and Zuckerberg’s respective testimonies,” Collins said.
“Given that these were follow up questions to questions Schroepfer previously failed to answer, we expected both detail and data, and in a number of cases got excuses,” Collins added.
—IANS
