social networking

This week Facebook admitted to wrongly sharing the personal data of thousands of app users with thousands of developers. The issue here isn't as simple as Facebook selling your personal information to advertisers, or Facebook allowing political advertisers to publish inaccuracies and lies on their platforms. Instead, it's more like a little mistake. A little mistake that lends more evidence to the idea that when a company is as big as Facebook, a little mistake can have big consequences.

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This week the folks at Cinemark Theaters released a video to their Twitter account showing their sanitization process. The video is brief - just 18 seconds long. In the video we see a man by the name of "Marc" in a theater in West Planto, Texas. Marc's job is "sanitizing [Cinemark's] auditorium seats before each movie." The entire situation is strange, to be sure.

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Keen is a new social network from Google and the creators at Google Area 120. It's an experimental sort of system in which users can create a "Keen" with a set of keywords for their interests. These "Keens" automatically retrieve "resources" (webpages and articles and such) for the user at user-set intervals of time. You can also "collaborate" on a Keen. But what's all that mean, and why should you care?

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This week the Facebook for Android app updated the way they show their brand - with all sorts of icons. You'll see Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. This is just the tip of the iceberg, really, as Facebook's ramped up acquisitions of companies over the last several years. Do you know if your favorite app and/or service is owned by Facebook? Let's take a look at the list of names that are actually owned and/or run by Facebook, from top to bottom.

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WhatsApp just fixed a system with which WhatsApp phone numbers were available to view and copy through a simple Google search. All WhatsApp needed to do was change a bit of code to de-index the lot of webpages created by their wa.me system - which they've done, this week. Users might never have known that their phone number was made public with this setup - but they might as well have suspected.

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I expected the Facebook photo transfer tool to be a grudging concession and tricky to use, but it's actually one of the easiest new Facebook features I can remember trying. Announced late last year, but only now available worldwide, it's a topical addition given a resurgence of questions about the ethics of one social network having so much power in our daily lives and around our electoral system.

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Depending on who you ask, the name "Google Currents" will mean something different. Most will have no clue about it while some will remember it as one of Google's failed social experiments focused more on full-length magazine articles. Last year, however, Google reused that name for what would practically be its replacement for Google+ in G Suite. Now it is announcing that this new Google Currents will be leaving beta testing in July, finally laying Google+ to rest for good.

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Facebook's photo transfer tool, which allows easy exports of any media uploaded to the social network, has rolled out globally the company has confirmed today. Announced back at the tail-end of 2019, the tool launched initially in Ireland as a way for Facebook users to move all of the photos and videos they've added to their profile to Google Photos, without having to download the archive first.

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This week a flood of posts to Instagram triggered a protocol built in to the platform to combat spam. One element isn't enough - a billion posts with the same hashtag posted in quick succession probably wouldn't have any problem on Instagram. But a billion posts with the same hashtag and the exact same image, all at once - that's where Instagram's automatic spam protection comes in to take action.

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In the time between the announcement of the Cyberpunk 2077 livestream event and now, a few things have happened. Now the event, called Night City Wire, will take place June 25th instead of June 11, as originally planned. Quite a few other events were postponed early this week as a result of worldwide protests of police brutality and the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Department officer (now former officer) Derek Chauvin.

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This week Facebook employees and leadership protested their CEO Mark Zuckerberg's inaction on messages from Trump. As Twitter marked inflammatory messages from Trump with fact-checking resources and/or warnings about their dangerous nature, Facebook did no such thing with similar/identical messages over the weekend. Zuckerberg reacted to Trump's messages with claims that "free expression" trumped all other matters.

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A set of social movements were given a name this week starting with an initiative called The Show Must Be Paused. The music industry was implored to take action starting on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. Per the announcement of #TheShowMustBePaused, this protest began in force in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black citizens at the hands of police.

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