by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
Moscow : Russian telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor has said that it will punish Twitter and Facebook if they decline to move the database of Russian users to Russia.
“The companies will either have to localise the databases within a certain period of time, which I suppose will be about nine months, or they will be punished,” Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.
He expects Twitter and Facebook representatives to meet with Roskomnadzor officials in Moscow by the end of February to discuss the issue.
Russian legislation requires Internet service providers to store and process personal data of Russians on the territory of Russia.
Roskomnadzor has the right to impose fines on or even block Internet companies for their violations.
In December, it fined Google 500,000 rubles (around USD 7,625) for failing to remove search links to banned information.
Last year, Roskomnadzor attempted to block instant messaging app Telegram in Russia due to its refusal to provide user data, but failed for technical reasons.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews, Markets, Networking, Social Media, Technology
Jack Dorsey
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : Stressing that data localization is an irrelevant debate in an era of Cloud, the deliberations must be in the direction of how people own and control their data, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said.
In an e-mail interview with IANS, Dorsey, who is in India on his maiden visit, said that in their business, “Internet is trending towards where data sits to be irrelevant”.
“The Cloud allows data to be everywhere. I think the more important question is whether people own their data and how they control it,” replied Dorsey when asked about the Indian government’s demand from the tech companies to store data locally so it remains within the law of the land.
According to Dorsey, there must be a conversation on data ownership, not localisation.
“That’s the conversation that I think we need to have rather than where exactly the data sits. It’s more about the ownership by the individual,” Doresy told IANS.
Dorsey arrived in India the last weekend and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress President Rahul Gandhi during his Delhi leg of the tour.
Even as the Twitter CEO was busy meeting with top leaders, the government pulled up the social network for being “slow” in removing “objectionable content” from its platform.
Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba, in his meeting with two top Twitter executives — Vijaya Gadde, Global Head of Legal, Policy, Trust and Safety, and Mahima Kaul, Public Policy head in India — asked them “to ensure a 24×7 mechanism for prompt disposal of requisitions of law enforcement agencies for deletion of unlawful/objectionable content from their platform”.
Twitter replied that it was committed to working with governments around the world, including in India, to encourage healthy behaviour on the platform.
Currently, there is no Grievance Officer from Twitter in India. To report a violation, the Indian users have to contact Jeremy Kessel in Dublin, Ireland.
Twitter’s European headquarters is in Dublin, as are those of Google and Facebook, where the Data Protection Commission is strongly enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that came into existence on May 25 this year.
According to Dorsey, he came to India to find out where the gaps are.
“One of the reasons why I’m here in the first place is to understand how to do that and understand where the gaps are,” Dorsey told IANS.
“We certainly have heard a lot about language support and that’s something I’ll be looking into. Access, in terms of data speed, is something we’ve been working on,” he added.
In his meeting with Rahul Gandhi, Dorsey discussed various steps the social network was taking to curb the spread of fake news and boost a healthy conversation on its platform.
Admitting that fighting fake news was no easy task, Dorsey told a meeting at IIT-Delhi said the social network was taking “multi-variable” steps, including the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to curb the spread of misleading information ahead of 2019 general elections in India.
“We think there is a lot of opportunity in India. We love the conversational nature of the society and culture. We’re really excited to make Twitter viable to more and more people in the country,” the Twitter CEO, who also visited Mumbai and met superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Oscar-winning music composer A.R. Rahman, told IANS.
According to Dorsey, the company launched Twitter Lite (a lighter data-friendly version of the main app) not too long ago, specifically for India, to reach people who don’t have access to hi-speed or costly data.
“India remains a top priority market for us and we’re making sure we understand how people use it here so that we can make it better.”
When it comes to monetising Twitter and further tapping the Indian market, Dorsey has his focus clear.
“We do have a very healthy data business, so we’ve monetised beyond ads already. We’d like to bring all of our revenue lines to all of our markets,” Dorsey told IANS.
“We’re always looking for opportunities to continue to build a business model that aligns with the interests of the people that we’re serving.”
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Giving its over 336 million users more control, Twitter has announced that it will completely revert their timeline into a pure reverse chronological feed.
The micro-blogging platform in 2016 announced that it will only show “most important tweets” and stop the most recent tweets first which irked many users.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Twitter announced that in the coming weeks, it will start testing a “way to switch between a timeline of tweets that are most relevant for you and a timeline of the latest tweets”.
“We’ve learned that when showing the best Tweets first, people find Twitter more relevant and useful. However, we’ve heard feedback from people who, at times, prefer to see the most recent tweets,” said Twitter.
“Our goal with the timeline is to balance showing you the most recent tweets with the best tweets you’re likely to care about, but we don’t always get this balance right,” it added.
This is how it will work.
Flip on the feature in your settings from the iOS or Android Twitter app.
When you open Twitter after being away for a while, the tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline — still recent and in reverse chronological order.
The rest of the tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always.
“At any point, just pull-to-refresh to see all new tweets at the top in the live, up-to-the-second experience you already know and love,” said Twitter.
“We’re working on making it easier for people to control their Twitter timeline, including providing an easy switch to see the most recent tweets,” said Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour.
Twitter has updated the “Show the best Tweets first” setting.
“When off, you’ll only see tweets from people you follow in reverse chronological order. Previously when turned off, you’d also see ‘In case you missed it’ and recommended tweets from people you don’t follow,” it noted.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : After suspending 284 accounts originating in Iran and Russia, Twitter on Tuesday announced it has cracked down on additional 486 such accounts that were designed to mislead people in the Middle East, Latin America, Britain and the US.
“Since our initial suspensions last week, we have continued our investigation, further building our understanding of these networks.
“In addition, we have suspended an additional 486 accounts for violating the policies outlined last week. This brings the total to 770,” Twitter said in a statement.
Fewer than 100 of the 770 suspended accounts claimed to be located in the US and many of these were sharing divisive social commentary.
“On average, these 100 Tweeted 867 times, were followed by 1,268 accounts, and were less than a year old,” said Twitter Safety in a tweet.
Last week, Facebook and Twitter removed hundreds of accounts that were originated in Iran and Russia.
Facebook removed 652 pages, groups and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”.
Facebook acted on these accounts after FireEye, a global cybersecurity firm, gave it information in July about “Liberty Front Press”, a network of Facebook Pages as well as accounts on other online services.
Based on FireEye’s tip, Facebook started an investigation into “Liberty Front Press” and identified additional accounts and Pages from their network.
“We are able to link this network to Iranian state media through publicly available website registration information, as well as the use of related IP addresses and Facebook Pages sharing the same admins,” Facebook informed.
Twitter suspended more than 70 million fake accounts in May and June in a massive drive to clear out bots and trolls on the platform.
Facebook recently deleted 32 Pages and accounts attempting to influence the US mid-term elections.
—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
