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Showing posts with the label facebook

Instagram was more relevant than Facebook in the Russian interference in the US elections, according to the Senate

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The Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election was so profound that its effects and origin are still being investigated. In the problem is often talk of networks of bots controlled that shared false news and attacking Hillary in one way or another, with the eye on Facebook and something on Twitter, but with Instagram going unnoticed and seen by the public as " the good network of Facebook ". The reality, according to The Guardian and Bloomberg, following two reports prepared for the US Senate by New Knowledge and researchers from the Oxford and Columbia universities and Candield Research LLC, is that the impact of Instagram on the Russian plot has been underestimated, until the point that in their appearances before the elected representatives, neither Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg mentioned it as the focus of the problem. But Instagram was important for the entity that according to the investigation was behind the manipulation, the Russian Internet R...

Facebook allowed "to function as an extension of the company" to Microsoft, Amazon or Netflix and others, giving them personal data and private messages

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It is December 19 and the year can still be very long to Facebook. Beyond how their actions have evolved in the stock market during the year, it is impossible to remember a worse course for the company, not so much for what they have done in it (as well) but for collecting the harvest of the bad practices carried out during so many years . After scandals like Cambridge Analytica, multiple security breaches or public knowledge and means of bad practices as a result of the publication of internal documents, comes the final culmination. Hand in hand with The New York Times (NYT), which recently published an extensive report on the company where the worst stop was Sheryl Sandberg, comes the publication of an investigation based on hundreds of pages of internal documents and interviews with more than 50 employees showing how Facebook would have reached agreements to allow access to data to 150 companies among which are large technology companies such as Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Apple...

How to know if someone has accessed your Facebook photos with the latest security breach

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There are companies that will end the year celebrating that in 2018 they have grown or improved their service. After so much scandal this year, Facebook is not among them, and is that a few days ago came to light the nth security hole, which exposed the photos of 6.8 million users. The good news is that they were not shared publicly, but only with the developers of applications to which the user had given permission. The bad, that the developers of Facebook do not have to be trusted (or the network itself, at this point), and may have acted on behalf of their own interests, and consequently, to the detriment of the privacy of users. Facebook has launched a statement where, in addition to reporting that the photos published in the biography and Facebook Stories were accessible between September 13 and 25, 2018 due to an API error, it also provides a tool to know what applications have had access to your other photos. If you open the web without being authenticated in the service, yo...

A Facebook error exposed unpublished photos of up to 6.8 million users

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Facebook has just revealed that a bug in the API photos of its platform gave application developers too much access to images of up to 6.8 million users. "We have solved the problem but, due to this error, some third-party applications may have had access to a larger set of photos than usual," they say in a statement. This new security breach of the social network headed by Mark Zuckerberg would have been open for twelve days, between September 13 and 25 of 2018. It has affected Facebook users who have used the network login and have granted permission to third-party applications to access their photos.     "When someone gives permission for an application to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only allow the application to access the photos that people share on their timeline, in this case, the error potentially gave developers access to other photos, like those shared on the Marketplace or Facebook Stories, the error also affected the photos that people...

The Cambridge Analytica scandal costs Facebook two fines for 10 million euros in Italy

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The bad news does not seem to end in 2018 for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and reality insists on remembering that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was so big and relevant that forgetting about it will not be something they can do so easily. The United Kingdom became the first country to fine the people of Menlo Park for the case, and although it applied the maximum penalty, everything was about 560,000 euros because it took place before the entry into force of the GDPR. However, as La Vanguardia picks up from the EFE Agency, the Competition and Market Guarantee Authority (AGCM) of Italy, an institution whose role is similar to the Spanish National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC), has imposed to the company a double fine amounting to 10 million euros. It considers that Facebook Ireland and Facebook Inc., which began investigating "for alleged violations of the Consumer Code", "misleads users who register on the platform, without informing them adequately...

Facebook patents a system to know where we are going and when we will be disconnected

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At this point we no longer have any doubt that Facebook wants to know us as best as possible, so we can show advertising that adapts perfectly to our tastes, beliefs, political ideas or where we live. Thanks to BuzzFeed today we know that the company has patented a system that uses the data of our location to predict where we are going and when we will be disconnected. Facebook says that "the patent does not mean that they are going to implement this technology" Andy Harrison, spokesman for the company, wanted to make it clear that "they often look for patents for technologies that we never implemented." Patent applications, as in this case, should not be taken as an indication of future plans. As we can see, the company tries to detract from the matter, assuring that this patent does not mean that they are going to implement this technology. Likewise, it is again evident that their interest continues to improve the tools that allow them to better know our habit...