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https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/11/17846512/facebook-rosetta-meme-machine-learning-text-recognition-hate-speech "Facebook is building AI to help them out. In a blog post today, Facebook describes a system it’s built called Rosetta that uses machine learning to identify text in images and videos and then transcribe it into something that’s machine readable." "Facebook says text extraction and machine learning are being put to use to “automatically identify content that violates our hate-speech policy” and that it’s doing so in multiple languages." How will Facebook decide what is offensive and not offensive? What else will they be doing with this data?

Federal regulators have filed a complaint against Facebook for letting landlords and home sellers pick and choose who gets to see their ads. Facebook is getting in trouble again for housing ads that a US agency says are discriminatory. The Department of Housing and Urban Development said Friday that it's filed a formal complaint against Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act because the social network lets landlords and home sellers engage in housing discrimination. Facebook allows advertisers to decide who gets their housing-related ads based on the users' race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability and ZIP code, according to a HUD press release. This conduct helps advertisers limit housing options for certain people as part of "targeted advertising," which is discriminatory. This is an ongoing issue with Facebook. A ProPublica investigation on the tech giant's advertising platform in 2016 showed that people could target housing advertisements to and away from specific races and ethnicities. Facebook said it'd try to fix it. A year later, ProPublica found that the social network was still letting such housing ads get through. The groups excluded from seeing those ads are all protected under the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination against potential renters or buyers on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin." HUD also said Facebook promotes its targeted advertising platform with "success stories" for finding "the perfect homeowners," "reaching home buyers," "attracting renters" and "personalizing property ads." The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York also joined HUD in district court on Friday because of other private litigants challenging Facebook's advertising model, according to the release. "There is no place for discrimination on Facebook; it's strictly prohibited in our policies. Over the past year we've strengthened our systems to further protect against misuse," said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, in an email statement. "We're aware of the statement of interest filed and will respond in court; and we'll continue working directly with HUD to address their concerns." Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-takes-heat-from-hud-over-allegedly-discriminatory-housing-ads/

Let's keep politics out guys and gals! So I was originally notified by Reuters for this news, but the same article can be found on this site. Essentially, the U.S. government is attempting to gain more access from Facebook's encrypted messenger for "criminal" related purposes: Also: As to Facebook, they say "it can only comply with the government's request if it rewrites the code relied upon by all its users to remove encryption or else hacks the government's current target, according to the sources." My opinion: It's not like Facebook wasn't doing shady things in the first place, that much is clear to more and more people nowadays. Still, this is a new red line that's being crossed, new uncharted territories in terms of breach of privacy.

Need to know for a person that wants to use OBS to livestream to YouTube and Facebook that is not gaming content but a commentary and interview content only. The interviews will be done with Skype. What is the minimum requirements needed for a laptop and also a desktop. Not to include the camera, mic, keyboard, mouse or other externals. I am not a techie and want to buy a christmas gift of a desktop or laptop that is under $300. It will be their starter item and may be updated to a new one in 1 year. It needs to be where I can purchase it online from a USA seller since it will be delivered to him in Oklahoma. Hope someone can help. Thanks.

Sources: Techcrunch, Instagram Blog Watch out YouTube, Floatplane IGTV is coming for you now. Oh boy! It looks like we haven't seen the last of Jake and Logan Paul on YouTube making shitty, obnoxious, and disturbing videos while convincing parents to buy their merch while selling shitty songs. Vine is dead, long live IGTV. *That puppy is cute though. So it begs the question, can vertical videos be monetized? Instagram says not yet but it'll come. So if you want to be an insta-famous vlogger in an instant, you need a phone preferably with good front and rear cameras, a 20,000 mAh battery bank and an unlimited data plan (in the US Verizon may have the best coverage but T-Mobile offers the best value, some countries have killed unlimited data though). So if they soon flipped on monetization of vertical IG videos, the creators have an advantage since you can't block ads with an adblocker if Instagram doesn't permit an adblocker to read the app. So yeah, welcome to the next generation of shock-value pandering, talent-less fame whores with millions of followers. Then there's an issue of adpocalypse. Will IGTV follow with YouTube's monetization practice as well if someone continuously posts disturbing content? I'm pretty sure political/religious commentaries won't even consider a vertical video format. Looks like YouTube and to some extent Floatplane Media has nothing to worry about...yet.

Original article from the Verge - https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17417428/facebook-trending-topics-being-removed I personally think this is a good thing because Facebook has said it has said it will be taking on fake news and trending was a good way to spread this fake news, however tge company has said it only accounted for 1.5% of clicks so that could be debated. This change is set to take effect next week says Facebook.

So I had started a live stream on Facebook about a week ago. I had been steadily growing and had decent traction. Well yesterday in the middle of my stream everything screwed up and Facebook kicked me out of my account. The only thing they said was send them a picture of me so they may verify my identity which I did and now all I see when I try to log in is this. I don't know what to do because its been almost a full 24 hours and nothing. I have also tried contacting Facebook but it is seemingly impossible as far as I can tell. Any advice?

Hello, I was wondering if you could help me. I would like to live stream on facebook, am planning to stream while playing PuBG but somehow I can't go live on facebook. Obs, a stream app cant connect to facebook live. I use i3 proc and Geforce GTX 1050 2gb video card. I would like to ask, what software do you use for live streaming that works perfectly on facebook? If you have any, please send me the link also. Thank you very much.

Hi everyone, recently, my mother had to go trough Facebook's photo identification (not ID) process due to 'unusual activity' while she was editing her page which was converted from her profile. I'm not surprised, since she's been using the name of the page as the personal account's name as well. It's an account that she has created about 1,5 months ago which has no profile picture of friends...Her profile was reactivated after 30 hours and she has immediately suspended (deactivated) it by herself. I was worried that because of she was using this profile in order to stalk on me and my father, our profiles could have harm because of the similar searches/views, but you guys calmed me down that it's not possible. Now here's my question: what she should do with her account? She'll be able to change her name in about 28 days, should she start to use her real name and fill it with her real info? In this case, because of the name change, etc. will the system automatically suspect some suspicious activity again, or will it be likely ok? Or should she just leave the account suspended? In this case, will it get investigated again (maybe automatically) even if she doesn't do anything? Thank you for your help!

Welp, seems like Tinder and Match is going out of business. I think tinder will be effected the most as they rely on facebooks platform way too much https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/facebook-is-launching-a-dating-app.html

Hi everyone, lately, I’ve been through quite a hard time with my Mother who’s pretty incompetent when it comes to technologies. Sorry in advance, but my native language isn’t English, but Hungarian. About a month ago, my Mom has created a Facebook profile with a fictional name, because she wanted to convert her profile into a page (yes, obviously, she should have used her real name even for the page). She had no friends,picture or info added to it. The problem is that she has created this profile in order to spy on me, because that I had lymphoma and she wanted to make sure that my things will go fine once I went back to school. Initially, all her searches were the exact same!! as mine, including pages, events, persons, and posts in an open group that I also regularly visit due to school (it’s a group in which we share material for studying). What is even worse is that she used my laptop for it, from the same browser, because we only have one device in our house. Lately, she’s been doing the same thing with my father: she’s been searching for the same things as him as well. On wednesday, FB required a photo identification (not an ID) for her profile due to suspicous activity while she was working on her page. She passed the test, her account was enabled after 30 hours, and immediately after getting her account back, she has suspended it. Now here’s my question: does FB continue to investigate her profile if she has suspended it? And more importantly, can me, or my father have any kind of problem because of the same searches and pages, etc. viewed from our profiles? I definitely don’t want to get in trouble for that stupidity. I also told my mother to not to touch her account ever again. Thank you for your help!

Browsing web in Chrome on my PC I noticed blinking Microsoft Edge icon on a task bar, when I opened the app it was opening new tab (I think every 15-30 secs) connecting to following address https://connect.facebook.net/log/fbevents_telemetry/. Closing the Edge didn't help, it opened again after probably a minute. Do you know what might that be? Some malware? Cambridge Analitica trying to break in? I'm kind of scared. Screenshot below, internet connection is ok, only during taking it I was rebooting router/modem.

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.” Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals. surprised no one has posted this yet https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files

As reported by The Guardian, a lawsuit has been filed against Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for "weaponizing" data for financial gain, misleading congress and tricking the competition: Facebook rejects the claims under the first amendment right "to make editorial decisions". A developer by the name of Six4Three alleges that Facebook is implicated in a scheme that abuses private user data: Apparently, if the documentation is real, Cambridge Analytica is but the tip of the iceberg: Basically, Facebook did not anticipate that Smartphones would become as popular as desktops in terms of browsing platforms: My opinion? I think most people won't hear about this, that's why I decided to share this article and do my part. Facebook is among the most insidious platforms that have surfaced from Silicon Valley, and I'll take every bit of evidence to scrutinize them. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuckerberg-set-up-fraudulent-scheme-weaponise-data-facebook-court-case-alleges

Everyone in the EU had been getting emails from every company they have signed up to in the past informing us of their updated privacy policy and trying to get us to opt in to marketing in preparation for GDPR which came into effect today 25/05/2018. Non EU citizens have likely been getting them too. GDPR is the EU's new flagship regulation designed to limit companies power over your data and how they can use it. It also is enforced by huge fines of up to 4% of a companies global turnover. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44252327 Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws on the first day the came into effect. Also sites that are not targeted at EU citizens (such as US news outlets) are starting to block EU citizens from accessing their services though fear of being fined by the EU. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44248448

On Thursday David Ingram of the Irish Times newspaper, in Ireland, reported that Facebook is set to make changes to its terms of service/governance that will effectively put 1.5 billion members outside the net of the EUs new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect on the 25th May. Currently, almost 1.9 billion Facebook users outside the United States and Canada are governed by the terms of service agreed with the companies’ international headquarters in Ireland. The Irish Times reports that, “Facebook confirmed the move on Tuesday” suggesting Facebook is keen to reduce its exposure to GDPR penalties, which allow for fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue for infractions. “The change affects more than 70 per cent of Facebook’s 2 billion-plus members. As of December, Facebook had 239 million users in the United States and Canada, 370 million in Europe and 1.52 billion users elsewhere.” – Irish Times In his recent Congress appearance, Mark Zuckerberg, when asked by Congressman Gene Green whether Facebook would extend the same protections to Americans that Europeans would receive under the GDPR, replied “Yes, Congressman. We believe that everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls. We have had a lot of these controls in place for years. The GDPR requires us to do a few more things and we are going to extend that to the world”. Today’s reporting by the Irish Times flags a significant concern for privacy protection advocates and could be highlighting the start of a trend by tech companies to isolate their users globally from terms of service and regulations such as the GDPR in Europe. LinkedIn, part of Microsoft, on the 8th of May will move non-Europeans currently contracted to LinkedIn Ireland, to contracts with US Based LinkedIn Corp. Apparently, these moves are to help users understand which legal entity is responsible for their data. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-to-put-1-5bn-users-out-of-reach-of-new-eu-gdpr-privacy-law-1.3466837 https://www.eugdpr.org/eugdpr.org.html

Facebook is moving the registration of 1.5 billion of its users from Ireland to Silicon Valley. Currently users from Africa, Asia, Australia and South America technically fall under the headquarters in Ireland, which means GDPR privacy rules would apply to those accounts as of May 25th. Facebook will be virtually transferring those registrations to the US headquarters, where privacy rules are nowhere near as strict. The data of European citizens falls under the GDPR no matter what, so that will remain in Ireland. Source 1 : https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-moving-1-5-billion-users-away-from-gdpr-protection/ Source 2 : https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/59jayz/facebook-just-took-data-protections-away-from-15-billion-users This was to be expected. Zuckerberg may claim to care about users' privacy as much as he wants, his actions once again speak louder than his words.

I have a family member that uses Facebook messenger and about 2 weeks ago all her messenger contacts on Facebook, phone, and messanger.com have disappeared. The active ppl on the right has also disappeared. Any help greatly appreciated as I don't use Facebook at all.

So in an article on Engadget Facebook said that they aren't seeing any drastic changes in its user base or the privacy settings. Now I know from talking to my peers that the reason for this is that they thought Facebook was doing this all along. What baffles me is the fact that they don't even want/care to change their privacy settings. Many people are content using Facebook the same way it was before all of the issues with Cambridge Analytica. As someone who is studying IT and is extremely concerned about my online privacy I have only used one social media platform which was mastodon only due to the unprecedented amount of control over you data/privacy and zero ads https://joinmastodon.org/ . It makes me upset every time someone says that they don't mind giving up their privacy for social media. How long will it be until no one cares at all and every large company knows everything about you because people failed to care about their privacy. Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/13/facebook-users-aren-t-changing-privacy-settings/

Source: Facebook Before anything else, do you think this will make MySpace and Google+ great again? I don't know if I can take anything Facebook said at face value considering the ramifications of the entire controversy like allegedly influencing elections by leaking personal information and targeting those people with specific political ads. Unlike a typical bug bounty where a white hat/gray hat hacker does penetration testing to an OS or hardware, how is this going to happen with Facebook being mostly a web service? Is Facebook's source code even open source for inspection? Nonetheless, Mark Zuckerberg made a promise in the senate hearing that Facebook will not only follow the GDPR but extend those data protections to everyone and not just EU citizens as The Verge reports: But looking at The Verge article, even the lawmakers themselves aren't buying that Zuck will extent GDPR rules worldwide and I share the same sentiment. Facebook's business model is about ads and bid data and I doubt that so much will change despite the $40k bounty. Definitely this is Zuck's worst nightmare as CEO. Since Facebook is operating in the EU as well, he's probably glad that the controversy didn't erupt on May 25, 2018 which is the date where the GDPR will be enacted. I encourage everyone to listen to the following Marketplace Tech podcast with Molly Wood episodes in relation to the Facebook controversy: 04/11/2018: The Data Economy: the role of advertising 04/10/2018: The deal we made with our data 03/22/2018: What Congress wants to hear from Facebook

The Belgian privacy commission sued Facebook for violating Belgian privacy laws. Facebook follows people on its own platform, but also on 3rd party sites via social plug-ins, cookies and "pixels" which are used to track users' behavior on those other sites. They also use them to track people who don't have a Facebook account. Seeing as those people never consented to the tracking, that is a big issue. Today the Brussels "Court of First Instance" completely agreed with the privacy commission and condemned Facebook. Facebook has been ordered to stop the tracking and delete all illegally obtained data or pay a fine of €250 000 per day up to a € 100 million (125M USD) total. Facebook has already declared that they are disappointed and will fight the verdict. Loosely translated from the Dutch article: Source (in Dutch, pretty sure there will be English sources soon) : https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2018/02/16/brusselse-rechtbank-veroordeelt-facebook-wegens-schending-privac/ EDIT : Source 2 : Reuters : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-belgium/facebook-loses-belgian-privacy-case-faces-fine-of-up-to-125-million-idUSKCN1G01LG Source 3 : CNBC : https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/16/reuters-america-facebook-loses-belgian-privacy-case-faces-fine-up-to-125-mln.html As someone who doesn't want to have anything to do with the kind of tracking that Facebook does, I can only applaud this. Let's hope other countries can do the same. Facebook's response sounds like PR nonsense. People who don't have a Facebook account still get tracked without getting any tools or choices, assuming those tools actually stop the tracking and not just make Facebook hide the tracking from the users to begin with. This isn't the first time. Facebook has been reprimanded in Belgian courts in the past for tracking people who are on their site without being logged in to a FB account or without having one. Facebook responded to that case by blocking all Facebook pages for people in Belgium who aren't logged in. Curious how they'll solve this one.

Twitter employees reveal in Veritas' undercover videos that Twitter uses both algorithm-based data detection and sorting, and also uses teams of people to sift through Twitter users' personal DMs, view their private sexual pictures, etc, to create a unique personal virtual profile of each Twitter user, that Twitter then sells to advertisers. https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/15/hidden-camera-hundreds-of-twitter-employees-paid-to-view-everything-you-post-online-including-private-sex-messages/ Twitter software engineer, Mihai Florea: Clay Haynes: The details provided in the video from Twitter employees also serve to give good warning and insight into what Microsoft does with the personal data it collects from Windows 10 owners. Just as the Dutch DPA investigation reported, all of the data that Microsoft collects through Windows 10 is personal, and none of it is anonymous, with all of it having multiple IDs to tie the data to the system, user, applications, device usage, location, Windows version, etc, that form a unique fingerprint for the person that the data came from. And that information is likewise used to create a virtual profile of each Windows 10 user, which is sold to advertisers, researchers, shared with government and law enforcement, etc And, of course, this is why Microsoft was offering a "free" update to Windows 10, why Microsoft left so many loopholes to continue accessing the "free" update to Windows 10 after the "free" period officially ended, and why Microsoft forced and tricked millions of people to get Windows 10 to install their PCs. The "free" offer was a sleight of hand move, not for Windows owners, but for Microsoft, who wants to be making as much perpetual data-based money as possible, from each person who hooks into Microsoft's massive data-theft farm. What is the point of rights to privacy rules in society, which corporations, and anything they choose to share your personal data with, for their personal profit, consider themselves exempt from, and behave outside of personal rights to privacy, and privacy rules and policies? Also, what do these people who look at personal information, whether at Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google, do, when they come across sensitive corporate information, or information or ideas that could make their own company a lot of money, if they were to pick them up? It's obviously possible, and maybe very likely, that they just then steal those ideas. Facebook at least tries to figure out new ideas based on user usage of their devices (as Microsoft, and other big-data companies no doubt also do): https://www.fastcompany.com/40451455/facebook-is-spying-on-your-phone-habits-to-figure-out-which-ideas-to-steal-next I figure that it must be a risk for any major company to use software by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Google, etc.

Have you seen this guys? Here is the link to the original post in the PCMR facebook page

I put this in this forum because its mildly tech related. What would you guys think or do if Facebook made a phone? It wouldn't be too hard for them to enter the market since they are literally the biggest social platform on the web. I feel like it is possible since other companies are starting to make phones too (RED and Razer). I don't think it would be the greatest thing ever either because while facebook is great I feel like they would try to make it too integrated with facebook and try to sync everything connected to the phone with the facebook app. What do you guys think?