by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Embroiled in a massive data breach controversy, Facebook has beaten Wall Street’s estimates by raking in $11.97 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2018.
The social media giant reported $4.98 billion in profit — up from $4.26 billion in the last quarter.
“Despite facing important challenges, our community continues to grow. More than 2.2 billion people now use Facebook every month and more than 1.4 billion people use it daily,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted late Wednesday.
Facebook stock gained more than 4 per cent in after-hours trading and was up 7 per cent following its conference call.
Facebook added 70 million monthly active users (MAUs) to reach 2.196 billion globally — a 3.14 per cent growth rate.
Both daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs) saw an increase of 13 per cent year-over-year (y-o-y).
“We are taking a broader view of our responsibility and investing to make sure our services are used for good. But we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities, and bring the world closer together,” Zuckerberg said, who had recently testified before the US Congress over Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica was found misusing users’ data collected by a Facebook quiz app which used the “Login with Facebook” feature. In total, 87 million users were affected.
Facebook’s mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 91 per cent of advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2018, up from approximately 85 per cent of advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2017.
Facebook currently has 27,742 employees — an increase of 48 per cent y-o-y.
“Our focus in 2018 is to keep people safe and to keep building the experiences people expect from us. We are taking a broader view of our responsibility — to not only give people powerful tools but to make sure these tools are used for good.
“At the same time, we also need to keep building new services that bring people together in meaningful new ways. That’s what makes Facebook so important to so many people, and that’s our responsibility too,” said Zuckerberg.
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook’s initiative Internet.org has now helped almost 100 million people connect to the internet, up from 40 million in November 2016.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, News, Politics, Social Media, Technology
New Delhi : The Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT on Thursday told the government to make Facebook commit that it would not misuse the users data to influence elections in India or for any other extraneous purposes outside the purview of the local laws or terms of user agreement.
The panel headed by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Anurag Thakur told the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to take a pledge in writing from Facebook that it would not “misuse” the data “politically or otherwise”, sources said.
Earlier, Thakur said in a tweet that the panel met on Thursday to examine the issue of citizens’ data security and online privacy, and also heard the views of MeitY officials in this connection.
“This is an important issue and we will hold further meetings. The citizens may email their views on the matter to the Standing Committee,” he said.
According to sources, the panel also expressed concern at the lack of IT regulatory framework in the country.
The Standing Committee’s observation came after last month it came to light that British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the data of around 50 million Facebook users to influence elections in many countries, including the US presidential elections of 2016.
The Indian government has issued a notice to Facebook over suspected data breach of Indian citizens and also sought details of the measures the social media giant had put in place to ensure the safety and prevention of misuse of personal data of the users.
Facebook has admitted that nearly 5.62 lakh users in India were “potentially affected” by the breach.
Assembly elections are due this year in several crucial states in the country including Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Polling is scheduled in Karnataka on May 12.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Media, Opinions, Social Media
By Saket Suman,
The increasing polarisation among media in India — and perhaps across the world — has led to an unprecedented trust deficit in everyday news. What was once regarded as the fourth pillar of democracy today finds itself under the scrutiny of citizens as tainted news published with self-securing motives are an everyday occurence in our times.
The times we live in are extremely challenging for the media. How media outlets have been hand-in-glove with political leaders and parties is no secret today. A journalist now commands far less respect in society than was the case even a decade ago. All of this, along with a host of other compelling factors, have together led to a massive downslide in the media’s place in a liberal democracy. There is the suspicious eye of the audience, who, even while reading or watching what the media reports, refuses to believe. Media is no longer, for most audiences, the honest purveyor of news — difficult to digest but apparently true.
The very purpose of media’s existence is in a crisis — a crisis that could well result in social media taking on the “fourth pillar of democracy” tag. And this could happen far earlier than projected.
This may happen because of a variety of reasons, primarily because the attraction that the social media has for those who were earlier fed by the mainstream media and the increasing affordability of the internet for the less privileged.
From television channels to most leading dailies in India, the reportage on non-sensational news — whether it is cultural or social and clubbed as “soft” news — is fast diminishing. Pages that were earlier dedicated to theatre, music and books are being replaced with “hard” politics — or simply negative and conflict-bearing news — that point to the grim picture of the times we are living in. There is no space to breathe for a particular section of readers that is intellectually inclined. Social media, thus, comes as a natural relief to such audience as just a couple of clicks in the keyboard will lead a visitor to the content that he wants.
Added to this is the challenge posed by the affordability of the internet in India. Telecom operators have already rolled out unlimited monthly internet plans that are, quite shockingly, even cheaper than a monthly subscription of most newspapers. At the same time, there is a significant rise of “social media influencers” across platforms on the internet. Celebrities of the internet in their own right, many social media influencers target niche audiences based on language, geographical location and even religion and caste, in many cases.
But the most significant factor leading to a slide in the traditional media’s position is a result of its own doing. In the race to make the utmost use (and monetary profit) of the internet, media outlets of our times have given it their entire content. The excitement to read the newspaper early in the morning, therefore, is gradually dying, because almost everything that appears in the newspaper is already trending on the social media in advance.
As is widely known, the internet-news concept in India has been plainly borrowed from the West, without an attempt made to either protect the sovereignty of print or to filter the content that goes online. Internet thrives on content — and content of a certain kind that will appeal to the user instantly — clickbaits. So even newspapers that would never publish a certain kind of article in their print editions actually end up having many of those kinds on their websites. What we miss here is the trust deficit that gradually builds in the reader for the entire brand of a given newspaper that publishes such content.
The circulation mafias and selective advertisements have made matters worse for the traditional media.
But the rapidly rising popularity of social media and its increasing user-base cannot alone replace media as the fourth pillar of democracy. After all, media is the trusted voice of the people and, as African-American human rights activist Malcolm X said, media is “the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses”.
Hasn’t social media too come to command a similar, if not more vicious and quicker, authority today?
Social media and the internet are still new phenomena in India, something that even today’s college-goers have seen evolving before their eyes. Traditional media, on the other hand, has been around for hundreds of years. It is high-time that media entrepreneurs and voices from the fraternity re-evaluate traditional media’s interaction with social media.
If not, social media may well, if not already, replace the traditional media as the fourth estate — and that is a fear more forbidding.
(Saket Suman is a Principal Correspondent at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Networking, Social Media, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : It was the perfect photo-op when Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a town-hall meeting at the social media giant’s sprawling headquarters at Menlo Park, California, in September 2015.
With Facebook now embroiled in a massive data breach controversy, the bonhomie appears to be over, with India warning Zuckerberg of “stringent action”, including summoning him over the “misuse” of data to allegedly influence the country’s electoral process.
Zuckerberg has recently said Facebook will ensure that its platform is not misused to influence elections in India and elsewhere, but after witnessing how social media platforms were infiltrated during the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, nothing can be predicted at this point of time.
While governments the world over are fast formulating new laws that deal with users’ data security and privacy, and the spread of false news, India lags far behind on this front.
Is the country prepared in case a huge data security or privacy breach hits its people?
According to top cyber law experts, India as a nation has missed the broader point in the ever-changing tech landscape.
“The moot point here is: How do we regulate mobile app providers, social media players and intermediaries in terms of handling and processing the users’ data? We don’t have a data protection law in place. We neither have a national law on cyber security nor a national law on privacy,” Pavan Duggal, the nation’s leading cyber law expert, told IANS.
The absence of these critical laws has created a very fertile ground for the misuse and unauthorised access of users’ data by the service providers.
“On top of it, India has not revisited its stand on intermediaries’ liabilities since 2008. Also, the service providers have been given a great fillip by a judgement of the Supreme court, where the service providers are directed not to take any action till such time they get a court or a government agency order,” Duggal informed.
In such a scenario, service providers are using the “Indians’ data with impunity”.
“They are transferring them outside the territorial boundaries of the country because we as a nation are sleeping. Once the data goes outside the country, the government loses all control. This has a detrimental impact on the protection and preservation of people’s data privacy and personal privacy,” Duggal stressed.
India has to learn from the European Union (EU) when it comes to formulating a legal framework to secure data.
The EU has asked businesses and service providers globally to comply with its new privacy law — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — that comes into force from May 25 this year.
The EU GDPR has been designed to harmonise data privacy laws across Europe — to protect and empower all EU citizens’ data privacy and to reshape the way organisations across the region approach data privacy.
After four years of debate, the GDPR was finally approved by the EU Parliament on April 14, 2016. Organisations that fail to comply with the new regulation will face hefty fines.
Although a white paper on data security has been published by the Indian government for all the stakeholders to deliberate upon, the country is still working on drafting a data protection bill.
“India is woefully under-prepared to address issues of data protection and cyber-security. We need a data protection law that protects citizens from misuse of data with strict liability and extremely high statutory damages that must be awarded within a strict period of time,” said Mishi Choudhary, President and Legal Director of New Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC.in), a not-for-profit organisation.
According to Duggal, also a noted Supreme Court lawyer, India should not cut-paste any other country’s law as it has to deal with a different set of problems.
“India’s social realities are entirely different. The country has to deal with the huge issue of Aadhaar which is reeling under variety of cyber attacks because we have failed to apply cyber security as an integral part of the Aadhaar architecture,” Duggal told IANS.
India’s approach has to be based from its soil and the country must strive for data localisation.
“India should not allow its data to be stored outside its boundaries. Service providers must (be made to pay) high penalty if they are found to be misusing the data of Indians irrespective of if they are physically located in the country or not,” Duggal said.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Opinions, Social Media
By Amit Kapoor,
“Data is the new oil” has been a clichéd maxim of the internet age. But the events that unfolded last week have underlined the extent of complexities that can be created in society depending on the nature of its usage.
A year-long investigation by multiple media outlets in the US and Britain revealed that a consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, accessed data of at least 50 million social media users without their proper consent. They then used these data points to psychologically profile people and individually target them with politically-motivated content to manipulate the 2016 US presidential elections. A similar approach was used to influence electoral outcomes all around the world, possibly even in India.
Even though the process of manipulating the political narrative during elections is not something new, there is something sinister about for-profit organisations and foreign agents using data technologies to disrupt democratic norms. If electoral outcomes come to be defined by exploiting deep-rooted psychological fears of voters based on data analytics instead of developmental issues that drive progress and prosperity, social cohesion will fall under immediate threat, proving pernicious to the very fabric of democracy. The political vision of governments and politicians need to be steered by people instead of mathematical algorithms.
It must be highlighted that social media and the vast explosion of data due to it are not the problems per se. However, when societies are finding themselves being increasingly run by data, a defined set of ethical norms need to be formulated to guide its use. The issue is of the utmost importance for India, as it has a significant online presence that is vulnerable to privacy violations. It has the highest number of Facebook users and the second-highest number of Twitter users in the world — with a combined reach of almost 300 million.
A committee of experts under Justice B.N. Srikrishna has already been set up to deliberate upon a data protection framework for India. It is working on drafting a data protection bill and has deliberated on a number of pertinent issues like what constitutes “personal data”, the specifications of consent and establishment of a data protection authority. A white paper has also been published by the authority, detailing a lengthy discourse on these very issues. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology has also listed “Citizens’ data security and privacy” as a subject of study. However, not much seems to have been done on the topic. Recent events might hopefully set the ball rolling on that front and inspire a multi-partisan report on the matter.
Once the processes of setting up a robust framework of regulatory policy and statutory law to govern matters of data privacy are complete, there will be a requirement to establish cultural expectations that incorporate ethical standards right when the data technologies are being built. The application of regulatory mechanisms after individuals have been profiled is akin to closing the stable doors after the horses have bolted. The race to become the next-big-thing in technology has placed ethics on the backseat and, hence, it is often the case that investigations are conducted, and apologies are demanded, only after the damage has been done. The environment of “develop first, question later” will have to change.
The issue of data and privacy regulations will become even more important as technological companies gain greater market share in provision of financial services instead of traditional banks. When you instantly transfer money to friends and family over apps like WhatsApp to avoid the hassle of asking around for bank account numbers, the company gains direct access to your transactions. The power of that data will lie with the entity which posses it. Interestingly, retail banks will begin to lose out on this essential oil as it will be unable to identify customer interactions once it shifts to these new age non-banks.
The use of data mining as a strategic tool, put in the right hands, can be a powerful tool to understand societal preferences and address consumer needs. However, no good comes with a complementing bad and our democratic societies need to be wary of the latter by building robust security mechanisms that ensure privacy and consent. At times, even that might not be enough. Consumers willingly hand over a lot of personal information for the convenience of services without knowledge of the consequences of their actions and the eventual use of the data. Therefore, a final action that needs to be undertaken in the world of data is to build user-awareness. There is simply no substitute to a well-informed consumer base.
(Amit Kapoor is chair, Institute for Competitiveness. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at amit.kapoor@competitiveness.in and tweets @kautiliya. Chirag Yadav, senior researcher, Institute for Competitiveness, has contributed to the article)
—IANS
