Facebook has struck a new deal with Crypt TV, the studio founded by Eli Roth and Jack Davis with backing from Jason Blum and his Blumhouse Productions. Under this deal, Crypt TV will create five original, exclusive horror shows for Facebook Watch, the social network's video platform. This represents an expansion of Facebook's work with Crypt TV.
Today we're taking a look at the quick rise and confusing fall of FaceApp and the privacy concerns therein. Early privacy-centered reactions to the app were blown a TINY bit out of proportion - but concerns still remain, in a big way. Yes, the app was developed in Russia*, but the Russian angle has nothing to do with the amount of privacy you can expect from the app. The most important part of the situation is in the User Content agreement FaceApp demands you agree to before you use their app. In the agreement, users agree that their images can be used by the creators of the app for basically any reason, at any time, without further consent from anyone.
Yes, you read that right, Facebook stock just surged - upward - after the FTC announced that they'd sent a $5-billion fine to the company. That's the biggest fine the FTC's ever demanded of a tech company - but it's the equivalent of next-to-nothing for the social networking site and mega-brand. Let's do the math on this - Facebook made approximately 55,838-million USD in revenue in 2018. A fine of 5-billion is... not particularly damaging.
Cryptocurrencies have always been regarded with skepticism and suspicion ever since Bitcoin started hitting mainstream news. It has gained more momentum and support around the world but, unsurprisingly, governments are more cautious about officially acknowledging the technology. The latest to join those voices is none other than US president Donald Trump who, in a series of tweets, expressed his dislike of Bitcoin and its kin and also took the opportunity to bring up Facebook's new Libra "virtual currency".
What's the deal with Facebook right now - and what's happening with WhatsApp and Instagram? Several major social networks were effectively put out of commission this morning by a yet-unnamed software issue. While Snapchat and Twitter rest on different, separate servers from the rest, while the rest are owned by Facebook. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all under the one umbrella, also called Facebook.
Instagram has introduced a new chat sticker for Stories that enables viewers to participate in group chats, potentially increasing engagement for users and making it easier to get a conversation going. The new sticker can be used for arranging meetings with friends, giving fans a chance to chat, and more. The sticker is available to Instagram users in the app now.
One of the advantages of being a part of a larger company is the ease of sharing with other parts of the company. At the same time, that could be problematic if your parent company happens to be named “Facebook”. WhatsApp has been particularly careful to distance itself from its owner but its upcoming Status-sharing feature could raise concerns once again. Fortunately, at least according to the company, it isn’t doing anything new on iOS or Android to implement it.
It’s probably not a dirty secret that companies use no small amount of psychological tactics to get users hooked on their products. Sometimes, the simplest form of addiction can be a single red dot. That’s the stuff that most notifications are made of and they have been a long—standing cause of distraction and anxiety for people, especially mobile users. As part of its mission to do better, Facebook is playing around with the option to turn off some but not all of its notifications dots, but not without some confusion.
This morning, Facebook confirmed some long-running rumors by announcing that it's about to dive into the world of cryptocurrency. That cryptocurrency is called Libra, and it'll launch next year alongside a digital wallet called Calibra. Calibra will be a subsidiary of Facebook, while Libra will be governed by the Libra Association, an organization comprised of a number of different companies (including Facebook and Calibra) that's headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
This week music track lyrics-centric company Genius showed the press how their data was published to Google without their consent over the past several years. To prove that their site was being scraped for data, Genius used specific formatting in lyric lines - commas, and the like, that wouldn't normally be in a set of lyrics - and there they were, published in Google Search, in "infoboxes" they say were sourced from 3rd-party partners.
In an effort to improve the conversations found on some Facebook posts, the company has announced improvements to its comment ranking that will use a number of factor to determine which comments get more visibility. The ranking system is necessary on posts from people and Pages who have many followers, helping users find meaningful conversations through the hundreds of otherwise uninteresting comments.
Next to Google, Facebook is perhaps the biggest tech company holds most of the population personal data. The amount of information, be it text or photos, that people upload, provide it data points that can be used to build very accurate profiles. Unlike Google, however, Facebook hasn't been grilled over its privacy practices, or lack of it, until recently. Now all its old practices, messages, and secret policies are being dragged into the spotlight, revealing that Facebook's culture of disregarding users' privacy comes from its top executives.