After some teasing and a couple of red herrings, Commodore today unveiled a retro-styled flip phone dubbed the Callback 8020. More specifically, the classic computing brand has showcased a Linux-based clamshell phone with “no social media, no browser* + no work or email apps.” This is its first original product designed to promote its philosophy of technology serving us, not enslaving us. It hopes to help others reap the benefits of a digital detox with the Callback, which sits flexibly between rival smart and dumb phone offerings.

• Join the Commodore Callback 8020 waitlist now to save $50.
• Pre-orders go live on June 30^th at 10:00 CEST.

Before we look more closely at the Commodore Callback 8020 and its tech specs, it may be enlightening to consider what Peri Fractic, President & CEO of Commodore, says about the origin of this surprising product. In a letter to Commodore fans, he explains that the Callback 8020 is the result of his own personal journey in curing phone addiction.

After switching to an Android flip phone, in an effort to promote digital well-being, Fractic says the process involved “learning what worked, what didn’t, and what people wanted.” Thus, the Callback 8020 was designed as “the perfect middle ground between dumb and smart, and what should a Commodore phone be today?”

The software that has helped Commodore achieve its middle ground looks like it is basically a custom version of the Jolla Sailfish OS. Thus, it can still deliver plenty of smart functionality, partly due to the broad Android app compatibility of this Linux-based OS. So, how does Commodore ensure that the Callback “minds its own flippin’ business?”

Apparently, the OS has hard blocks to stop the installation of browsers and social media apps. We guess it has some kind of app store blacklist, as the device FAQ confirms, “Users are still able to sideload apps outside those that are blocked, using APK installer files, but Callback is designed first and foremost as a calmer, more intentional phone.”

On the hardware side of things, there seem to be enough modern features to satisfy users who fit the profile of desiring an in-between smart and dumb-phone solution. It supports global LTE cellular connectivity, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth wireless, and even GPS. At the heart of the Callback is a MediaTek Helio G81 SoC, with 4GB/64GB on board. A 32GB microSD card is included to get you started, too.

Other internal components worth mentioning are the touted “audiophile-grade DAC,” which supports HD audio and lossless files, with HQ IEM (wired) earphones included in the box. Moreover, the phone’s ESS and Cirrus Logic audio chips are used to pump sounds, including its Commodore SID ringtones and built-in FM radio, to your ears.

A minimal closed clamshell display shows time and battery status, and a color LED system can be used for notifications. Opening the device, you have a 3.25-inch IPS screen with 480 x 640 pixels, a selfie camera, and a pretty ordinary-looking T9 keypad with a Commodore button.

Around the back, there’s a 48MP Sony camera with flash. The back cover is removable to swap batteries, swap the aforementioned microSD card, and access the Dual-SIM slots. Commodore is also marketing cases it calls Snapback packs, the Hardback case, and even a Backpack holster.

Finally, we are glad to hear the Callback 8020 “Ships with a modest selection of classic and modern, mindful Commodore 64 games. And with Nokia heritage, Snake of course.”

The Commodore Callback 8020 will be available in five colorways: ProtoPET White, SX Silver, BASIC Beige, Starlight Edition, and a (gold) Founders Edition. Pricing starts at $499, but there is $50 off for those joining the waitlist. Pre-orders begin at the end of this month.

Norway's Forbrukerrådet, the government-funded Norwegian Consumer Council, published an 80-page report on February 27, arguing that companies across the tech industry are systematically degrading hardware and software after the point of sale to extract additional revenue from locked-in consumers. The report, titled "Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future," singles out connected devices, printers, video games, and cars as categories where the practice is most acute.

The report refers to this practice as “enshittification,” a gradual, three-stage process in which a company initially attracts users with a genuinely useful service, then degrades that service to benefit business customers, and finally squeezes both groups to maximize returns for shareholders. According to the Forbrukerrådet, digital products are uniquely vulnerable to this cycle because manufacturers can alter them remotely after purchase through software updates. Below, you can see a video the group created about the issue as well.

“Companies can degrade the functionality of your car or effectively destroy your connected washing machine with a software update,” says the report, going on to call out printer ink cartridges, smart home devices that lose features or require subscriptions post-purchase, and connected vehicles where functionality is gated or removed over time, such as Tesla’s self-driving feature which has switched to a subscription-only service as of February 14. The report also describes how freemium games use forced ad breaks and in-game virtual currencies to convert what were once single-purchase titles into recurring revenue streams

On right to repair, the report notes that the EU Right to Repair Directive, entering into force on July 31, will require manufacturers to reduce parts pairing and allow third-party repairs. This is likely to be a huge thorn in the side of printer manufacturers and device ecosystems that have historically tied consumers to proprietary consumables and service networks.

Alongside the report, the Forbrukerrådet and 28 co-signers — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and Cory Doctorow — sent an open letter to EU policymakers on February 27, urging stronger enforcement of the Digital Markets Act and the GDPR, and pushing back against the European Commission's "Digital Omnibus" package, which the letter argued risks diluting existing consumer protections.

The collective is pushing toward the EU Digital Fairness Act, which the Commission included in its 2026 work program with a proposal expected in Q4 2026. The act is expected to target dark patterns, influencer marketing, addictive design, and unfair personalization across digital products and services.

A public consultation that closed in October 2025 drew roughly 3,000 responses in its first two weeks alone, many from gamers pushing for provisions that would prevent publishers from disabling titles consumers have already purchased — a campaign known as Stop Killing Games.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the idea for the World Wide Web back in 1989, his vision for it could be likened to a digital Library of Alexandria, with all human knowledge centralized, a cooperative attitude, and most of all, free. Fast-forward about 37 years, and while the Web did indeed bring the world together, it's fair to say that it didn't do so quite in the manner that Berners-Lee hoped for.

In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee discusses where exactly things went wrong, and how they can perhaps be fixed in what he describes as "a battle for the soul of the web," noting that "it's not too late." The Web had a fairly peaceful early start without ads, heavy commercialization, and cleanly served the purposes of information and some entertainment, but started shifting around the late '90s with the dot-com boom and "charlatans", in Berners-Lee's view.

It wasn't until the polarization of the 2016 U.S. election that he had enough with the Web's toxicity, something that reportedly left him "devastated." He acknowledges that social media does not represent the entire web, but that "the problem is that people spend a lot of time on [social media websites] because they’re addictive," having later described them as "optimized for nastiness".

Interestingly, Berners-Lee notes that while early viewpoints on the internet were neutral and moral judgments were about how people used it, nowadays "the way you design a website, like Reddit or Pinterest or Snapchat, can be explicitly good," with the opposite, as now proven, equally possible.

He's since created and is promoting the Solid project, that can very broadly be described as a user-controlled, decentralized API for personal data sharing, accessed via standard web protocols. Users create their own "pods" where all their personal info lies, along with everything they publish online, and data collected about them. They can then choose to grant entities specific control over what data is accessed.

Berners-Lee believes this can bring sovereignty of personal data back in people's hands, and even went as far as raising $30 million for Inrupt, a company with a mission to "provide commercial energy and an ecosystem to help protect the integrity and quality of the new web built on Solid". Notably, though, there's nothing forcing the current web's gatekeepers like Google and Meta to use the Solid protocol — much less to copy any data they may be granted access to.

Still, he think that "the existing systems will fade to a certain extent, because people will get more excited in new systems." In this case, he's referring to developers engaging with the Solid project, who "they start coding just because of what they can imagine."

You can click through to the Guardian to read the entire interview and read Berners-Lee's thoughts on social media ban laws, the AI takeover, and other topics.

Children in Russia have raised their voices, demanding to be heard, saying the government has gone too far. A state representative admitted that 63,000 complaint letters were received in a single week, with half of the irate youngsters threatening to leave Russia. What’s the fuss? Is it something to do with the ongoing war or sanctions? No, it is a backlash against the banning of the Roblox gaming platform, reports The Moscow Times.

The ban is "for their own protection"

Official Russian media say that the Roblox ban was put in place to prevent the platform from distributing extremist materials and promoting “LGBT propaganda.” The game from the California company is full of “inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children,” asserted Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor, according to a statement viewed by The Moscow Times.

Probably more specific and worrying, for parents everywhere, were the assertions by the Russian watchdog that kids playing Roblox may be sexually harassed, tricked into intimate photos, or even be “coerced into committing depraved acts and violence.”

Indeed, this is a worry for the parents of all open online platforms frequented by youngsters. Thus, the Roblox corporation asserts it implements “moderators and automated systems to proactively identify behaviors that may violate our policies.”

Leaving Russia for the love of Roblox

Two figures pretty high up in the Russian administration have admitted that the children of the country have been vociferous in their complaints about the Roblox ban. Putin’s well known press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed that the Kremlin received “many” letters from children about the ban imposed on December 3.

Pro-Kremlin censorship advocate Yekaterina Mizulina also told her Telegram followers that she had received 63,000 letters from kids aged between eight and 16 on this ban. Half of them said they wished to leave Russia due to the Roblox blockade, according to Mizulina.

Roblox was the most downloaded game in Russia as recently as 2023. It is extremely popular with kids, with 111.8 million daily users, according to the latest monthly metrics we have seen. Around 40% of Roblox gamers are 13 or under.

The blocked in Russia club

Perhaps it is no surprise that Roblox, the latest Western-owned platform with social media elements, is being blocked in Russia. You also can’t use Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, or LinkedIn there, for example.

Meanwhile, YouTube is throttled and disrupted in favor of the state-backed RuTube. (Is there going to be a RuBlox soon?) Russia’s domestic VK social network is most widely used there, and is heavily moderated, and features automatic content filtering according to Roskomnadzor’s blacklist.

Starbucks has issued a countrywide crackdown in its Korean locations, demanding that customers stop turning its cafés into quasi-WeWork spaces, after a spate of incidents involving people bringing desktop PCs, printers, and even office partitions into its stores in the country.

Seeing people pecking at their laptop keyboard while they cradle a latte will be a common enough sight at your local Starbucks in the U.S. However, some South Korean folk have managed to outstretch the limits of the coffee chain’s hospitality. The Korea Herald reports that “every branch” of Starbucks in the nation has put up signs telling customers that bringing in their desktop PCs, printers, power strips, and even putting up office partitioning, is no longer permitted.

Local news reports suggest that the Starbucks customers with a penchant for bringing their home offices into the café are “a small but persistent group of clients.” The signs urge people to make room for their fellow coffee drinkers, and not to abandon their tech clutter at shared tables for long periods.

Are you a cagongjok?

MSI Gaming’s social media team in China recently posted a joke about a neglected girl deleting her boyfriend’s games. According to a report shared by ITHome, the joke backfired with netizens in China bitterly complaining about MSI’s post and threatening to boycott the company’s products. However, the fallout from MSI’s comedy misfire has gone even further over recent days: the offending social media post was deleted and the team made an apology, Asus enjoyed trolling its rival, and the MSI Gaming social media team in China has now been replaced with the promise to hold relevant personnel accountable.

On January 17, the MSI Gaming social media team in China uploaded a humorous post on a microblogging platform, presumably Weibo. The central message of the post seems to have been from the perspective of a neglected girlfriend who wished to delete her boyfriend’s games so she would get more attention.

From what we understand from the translated source, part of the joke was that the girl used her boyfriend’s PC and threw some game shortcuts in the trash. The social media post’s comedic message, probably mangled by Google translate, was “Refuse to be mentally drained; start by deleting the boyfriend game.”

On January 18, Asus social media posted that gamers should “Buy Asus, don't delete games.” MSI’s original post was, by this time, attracting a lot of negative comments, and ITHome reports that Asus’ skillful trolling became a trending topic in China.

On January 19, a post was published by a person who claimed they were from MSI Gaming, and they issued a long and sincere apology for the joke about deleting PC games. In addition to the apology, they tried to explain the humor behind the joke. Sadly, the original offending post was removed by MSI Gaming, so we can't check its content.

On January 20, MSI Gaming issued a formal apology on Weibo. You can see a full machine translation in the featured text box. It seems like things got serious for the social media team behind the ill-fated post. We hope they weren’t treated too harshly for their humorous faux pas, but it doesn’t sound good. “Through the investigation of this incident, our company has stopped all work of the relevant operation team and replaced it, and at the same time, the relevant personnel will be held accountable,” says a statement from MSI Gaming on Weibo.

Social media managers can do a lot to enhance, or impair, brand support

We expect the MSI Gaming Weibo account will be pretty serious until the above incident has been long forgotten. The firm’s reaction shows the powerful role a social media team fulfills and how they can do a lot to enhance or impair a company’s online marketing.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is an alternative social media platform which uses individual servers, each independently run by an administrator, to create a larger network (often called the "Fediverse," a combination of "federated" and "universe") where users can post messages. 

Each Mastodon instance is independent of others, in much the same manner as an email server. You may sign up for one instance, but you can send and receive messages with others. The example given on the Mastodon GitHub page is that when we sign up for an email account with Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook, we are not limited to just sending emails to users on the same server.

Unlike Twitter, Mastodon has two timelines, local and federated. The local timeline is every post with a public status from users on the same instance as you. The exceptions are posts (which were called toots) which are replies to others. The federated timeline is every post with a public status from other instances which are known to your instance. Both of these timelines can be busy, with posts flying up the screen. A new term to learn is “boost” which is analogous to Twitter’s retweet. Of course, you can also follow a feed made of accounts that you have subscribed to, much like Twitter.

How can you move from Twitter to Mastodon and which is the right instance for you? In this how-to we will cover exactly that and learn how to cross post from Mastodon to Twitter and search for our Twitter followers on the many Mastodon instances.

Moving from Twitter to Mastodon

The first task when moving from Twitter to Mastodon is choosing the correct instance. With Twitter, there is just one instance and timeline. But with Mastodon you first have to choose an instance (server). There are two things to consider. Firstly, the size of the server. A larger server is more likely to be backed by a group / organization that can financially support it. Smaller servers may be quiet havens in a busy world, but they run the risk of being the folly of a well-intentioned and eager admin. Secondly, try and select an instance for a subject you are interested in. This means that your posts will merge seamlessly with the posts in the local timeline. If you are interested in Raspberry Pi, but others are not, then your posts may not get the attention they deserve.

1. Open a browser to this wizard to select the correct server for you, click Start to begin. If you know which instances you're interested in, you can also go to them directly.

2. Set your preferred language(s) and click Next.

3. Select the number of users that you would like on an instance. Smaller instances are quieter, but you run the risk of the instance disappearing. We chose “It does not matter”.

4. Set your moderation rules for each of the criteria and click Next. The moderation rules are used to filter instances that support your choices.

5. Use the search bar to filter the instances for your chosen subject. We searched for retro computing hardware and found two instances that supported our interest.

6. Click on your preferred instance and follow the sign-up process. The sign up process is generally straightforward, requiring you to provide a username, password and email details. Some instances are invite only. Popular instances, such as mastodon.social have periods where sign-ups are paused. This is to reduce the load on the server. Before signing up it is wise to read the rules / terms for that server.

Your First Post

In Mastodon a message can be sent to your followers, and, in this case, anyone on the local and federated timelines. 

1. In the web interface type, in your message and click "Publish" to send a message to all of your followers, local and federated timelines.

2. Type @ and then the first few letters of a follower name to send a post directly to a follower.

Sending a DM

1.  Search for / select the person who you wish to DM. There is a search box in the top left of the Mastodon page.

2. On the recipient's profile click on the three vertical dots and select Direct Message.

3. In the dialog box on the left side of the screen, type your message and click Publish to send. Note that the message starts with @ and the name of the recipient. Also note that the Publish button has a padlock. Indicating that the message is private.

4. Alternatively, click on the globe icon and select “Mentioned People Only” then type in the handle of the recipient. Direct messages will still appear in your home timeline; this is normal and does not mean that it has been sent to all of your followers. Not that the timestamp (top right) is altered to show @ rather than a globe. This means the message is private.

5. Messages can also be posted as Unlisted, visible to all (but opted-out of discovery) or only for Followers.

Finding Your Followers

You’ve made the move, but have your Twitter followers? That carefully curated group of followers are mostly likely in the same boat as you. So how do we find our followers and the people we follow?

The simplest way is to use a tool that checks your follower list and searches for them on the many Mastodon instances. Debirdify by Manuel Eberl is just such a tool and we will use it to find our followers on Mastodon. Hat tip to Drew Fustini (https://mastodon.social/@pdp7) for pointing us to this tool.

1. Open a browser and go to the Debirdify website.

2. Click on "Authorise With Twitter."

3. Authorize Debirdify to use your Twitter account. This provides read only access to Twitter, enabling the tool to scan your followers and the people you follow, and use the data to search Mastodon’s instances.

4. Click on Search Followed Accounts to search for the accounts that you follow on Twitter.

5. Scroll down the page and download the CSV export. Graphs and a list of followed accounts (grouped by instance) show how they are spread across the many instances of the fediverse.

6. Click on Search Followers to find those that follow you on Twitter.

7. Scroll down the page and download the CSV export. Graphs and a list of followers (grouped by instance) show how your followers are spread across the many instances of the fediverse.

8. Open a browser to your Mastodon account and click on Preferences. Our instance is on mastodon.social, opening this in a browser will open a columned display similar to Tweetdeck.

9. Click on Import and Export.

10. Click on Import and then set the import type to Following list and then select the CSV file containing the accounts that you followed on Twitter. Ensure that Merge is selected before pressing Upload. This will merge the list of CSV contacts with your current Mastodon contacts.The process can take some time, depending on the instance's current load and the number of users in your list.

11. Optionally, import the list of the accounts that follow you on Twitter. 

The import will take some time and will happen in the background, over the next few hours you will see many notifications confirming that you are now following the accounts.

Cross-posting Between Mastodon and Twitter

Cross-posting is where we can post from one service to another. It is normally used when either migrating one service to another, or for growing your presence across multiple services. Setting up cross posting is a simple matter of authorizing an application to act as a bridge between the two services.

1. Open a browser to Mastodon Twitter Crossposter. This project was created by Renato Lond Cerqueira.

2. Click on Twitter and authorize the Crossposter app to access your account.

3. Click on Mastodon and authorize the Crossposter app to access your account.

4. Check that both accounts are now linked. This provides the basic bridge between the two services.

5. Click on Options >> Options overview. Using this menu we can further tweak the settings at a granular level to create a bespoke bridge between the services.

6. Select to send your posts to Twitter, and Tweets to Mastodon then click Update User. Now we have set up the basic bridge between Twitter and Mastodon. In our example we have decided not to post our Tweets to Mastodon, but our posts will go to Twitter. You may want to experiment with this and consider which messages are appropriate for which platform.

7. Click on From Mastodon to Twitter. Here you can optionally configure which messages are sent to Twitter. Tweak your settings accordingly and click Update User to save.

8. Click on From Twitter to Mastodon. Here you can optionally configure which messages are sent to Mastodon. Tweak your settings accordingly and click Update User to save.

Mastodon Clients

Mastodon can be used via the browser, and for the first few days of using Mastodon that is exactly how we used it. 

The basic UI is pleasant and easy to use. Power users can unlock a Tweetdeck inspired UI via Preferences >> Advanced > Appearance > Enable Advanced Web Interface. 

But there are alternative clients for the desktop and mobile devices, including official apps, which provide a better user experience.

For Windows, macOS and Linux users, Whalebird is an excellent application which uses a Slack-inspired layout to enhance your Mastodon experience. The layout is clear, with a series of tabs along the left side of the interface offering quick access to notifications, direct messages and the local / public timeline.

For Android users, Tusky has proven to be a good client in the time that we have been using it.

The interface is clear, with a top row for quick links to our timeline, notifications, local and federated timelines. Posting, boosting etc are all within easy reach and the user interface feels responsive.

Researchers at Facebook today announced Project Aria, its work on a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses. Facebook is in the very early stages of the project, not even calling it a prototype and only letting a few personnel use it for R&D purposes.

Project Aria is anticipated to be a critical tool in the development of a future product. The vendor didn't confirm when we could expect to Facebook smart glasses on the market or even when a working sample would be shown off. 

However, the tech giant did confirm a partnership with EssilorLuxottica to use Ray Ban branding on its upcoming smart glasses.

"The partnership will combine Facebook apps and technologies, Luxottica’s category leadership and iconic brands and Essilor’s advanced lens technology to help people stay better connected to their friends and family," EssilorLuxottica's announcement explained. "The first product will be branded Ray-Ban, the world’s most popular eyewear brand and is scheduled to launch in 2021. " 

Facebook emphasized that Project Aria is not a prototype of any sort. Instead, the new device is a research tool intended to help gather data for the development of useful, compact AR components. The news follows a recent blog post from Facebook expressing a desire for an improved surround sound experience in AR environments.

The new glasses only make use of a few sensors. They don't have any display mechanism, so wearers won't see anything in the lens to create an AR experience. The sensors capture things like audio and video from the wearer's perspective with the intention of helping the team better understand how they can go about augmenting day-to-day experiences.

The glasses feature a full sensor suite like the ones found in VR headsets to calculate spacial awareness. They also use a GPS to determine and log location information and can take "high-res" images and "capture multichannel audio and eye images," according to Facebook's blog. 

In alternate reality news, as part of its Facebook Connect event today Facebook also announced the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset and its discontinuing of the Oculus RIft S 

The Facebook Reality Labs research team today highlighted new advancements on the audio front of their augmented reality (AR) work. The ultimate goal is to create a pair of AR glasses. These steps are part of the process to refining the end product.

Seeing Facebook bring more attention to AR is pretty exciting. Oculus has continued pushing virtual reality (VR) closer to the mainstream since being acquired by Facebook, making some of the best VR headsets on the market. That includes the standalone Oculus Quest, which works without tethering to a pricey gaming PC or phone. We've yet to see a pair of AR smart glasses see as much success as the Quest. 

As Facebook Reality Labs progresses towards the final design of its AR smart glasses, they have considerable work ahead of them to ensure the product is desirable and immersive. Recent developments take place in two areas: Audio Presence and Perceptual Superpowers, (which sounds a lot more exciting than the actual technology but is still notably useful).

"The mission of the team is twofold: to create virtual sounds that are perceptually indistinguishable from reality and to redefine human hearing," Facebook's blog post says. 

Audio Presence is centered around reconstructing audio for a virtual environment, so the sound comes from appropriate directions. This is essentially like perfecting surround sound for AR. Refining the Audio Presence is a huge step in creating immersive environments.

When it comes to Perceptual Superpowers tech, the name may be a little generous. But don't let that discredit the seriously useful nature of what it does. This technology is designed to reduce distracting background noise so you can amplify the volume of your target audio source—like a conversation you're having at a table in a crowded restaurant.

Work like this is crucial to creating an optimized AR experience and directly tied to Facebook's AR glasses efforts, although incorporating the technology is still "a ways away," according to Facebook Research Scientist Manager Ravish Mehra. 

"Imagine being able to hold a conversation in a crowded restaurant or bar without having to raise your voice to be heard or straining to understand what others are saying," Facebook's blog says. 

"By using multiple microphones on your glasses, we can capture the sounds around you. Then, by using the pattern of your head and eye movements, we can figure out which of these sounds you’re most interested in hearing, without requiring you to robotically stare at it."

Facebook wants its AR smart glasses to be stylish and understand the visual and acoustic world around you in order to provide useful information.

"When you walk into a restaurant, for example, your AR glasses would be able to recognize different types of events happening around you: people having conversations, the air conditioning noise, dishes and silverware clanking," the blog explains. "Then, using contextualized AI, your AR glasses would be able to make smart decisions, like removing the distracting background noise — and you’d be no more aware of the assistance than of a prescription improving your vision.

Facebook announced yesterday that it won't host its annual F8 developer conference this year because of the Coronavirus outbreak. But the company said that it will attempt to make up for the cancellation "through a combo of locally hosted events, videos and live streamed content" and that it still plans to host F8 in 2021.

F8 is just the latest tech-related conference affected by Coronavirus. GSMA canceled Mobile World Congress 2020, Sony pulled out of PAX East and multiple companies announced that they won't attend the Game Developers Conference 2020 because of the viral outbreak. We suspect other events will suffer from similar problems.

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The news might be troubling for developers, but it could be devastating for business owners in San Jose who have likely come to rely on the sudden influx of visitors. Facebook also donates a percentage of F8 ticket sales to "an organization working to diversify the tech industry," with the maximum donation amount being $250,000.

This year the company will attempt to address both of those problems by donating $500,000 to "organizations serving local San Jose residents." That should at least help offset the economic impact of F8's cancellation. (Although we doubt $500,000 makes much of a dent in the lost revenues that will result from this decision.)

Facebook said it will "share additional details on our plans for F8 in the coming weeks," and the company updated the conference's website with an email sign-up form people can use to receive more information about its plans for the event. It's not clear if any product announcements intended for F8 will be revealed this way.

Israeli security company, Check Point, announced that it found multiple security vulnerabilities in the popular Chinese TikTok application/social media site that allows mostly teenagers to create short clips of themselves and share them with friends. 

The announcement comes a time when members of the U.S. Congress have warned that TikTok censors content the Chinese government doesn’t like, and that the Chinese government may have access to the app’s user data. The Pentagon has also warned its personnel to delete the app, and some military branches have banned access to it on their networks. TikTok has so far denied all such allegations.

One vulnerability that Check Point researchers found would have allowed attackers to send forged messages to the app users that would have appeared to come from TikTok itself. Attackers could have benefited from this to send users malicious links containing malware that would then allow them to take control over users’ accounts, upload content in their names, and delete or even make private videos public.

According to Check Point, TikTok could also enable attackers to inject malicious content into trusted websites and then allow them to retrieve users’ personal information such as their name and date of birth. Check Point also discovered that one of the website’s features was to allow users to send themselves a SMS text in order to download the application. The researchers learned that they can use this functionality to also send malicious links to any user’s phone number.

The attackers could also use other vulnerabilities to silently follow a user without them knowing, and then gain the ability to see that user’s video IDs as well. Once they knew the video IDs, they can then use another vulnerability to make that private video public.

Check Point disclosed the bugs to TikTok on November 20 who fixed all of them by December 15.

Check Point sent a summary of its research to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to the New York Times. In February, last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against TikTok, saying it illegally collected personal information from minors. TikTok ended-up paying $5.7 million to settle the complaint.

Facebook isn't the only social media company that's misused account information. Twitter said yesterday that it "recently found that some email addresses and phone numbers provided for account security may have been used unintentionally for advertising purposes." But don't worry--it's all better now!

It might be hard to believe, but people often share information with social media companies that they want to keep private. The most common example is contact information (phone numbers and email addresses) used for two-factor authentication features meant to make accounts more secure. But it seems that companies simply can't manage to actually use the information the way it was intended, as Twitter just demonstrated.

Twitter said in a support article that it didn't share this information with its partners or "any other third parties." Instead, the company claimed it mistakenly used ostensibly private data to assist with its ad system, specifically its Tailored Audiences and Partnered Audiences tools. 

"Tailored Audiences is a version of an industry-standard product that allows advertisers to target ads to customers based on the advertiser's own marketing lists (e.g., email addresses or phone numbers they have compiled). Partner Audiences allows advertisers to use the same Tailored Audiences features to target ads to audiences provided by third-party partners. When an advertiser uploaded their marketing list, we may have matched people on Twitter to their list based on the email or phone number the Twitter account holder provided for safety and security purposes. This was an error and we apologize," Twitter said.

Twitter added that starting September 17, it started addressing the issue that caused this and is "no longer using phone numbers or email addresses collected for safety or security purposes for advertising."

Facebook similarly misused phone numbers provided specifically to enable two-factor authentication. Researchers said in September 2018 that those  phone numbers were used to inform targeted advertisements, even though Facebook claimed they wouldn't be, and then it was revealed in March that Facebook users could look people up by phone numbers that were supposed to be private.

At this point it's clear that, whether it's because of greed or incompetence, social media companies simply can't be trusted with information they promise to keep private. Twitter (or otherwise) being "very sorry" doesn't change that.

Facebook announced Monday that it bought CTRL-labs, a New York startup that develops technology that allows people to control computer user interfaces with their minds. CNBC reported that, according to sources close to the deal, Facebook paid between $500 million and $1 billion for the company. The startup will join the Facebook Reality division, which includes Oculus VR as well as augmented reality and brain-reading experiments.

CTRL-labs was developing a wristband that can receive electrical signals from your spine. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s Vice President of AR/VR, talked about how this works in a post about the acquisition:

“You have neurons in your spinal cord that send electrical signals to your hand muscles telling them to move in specific ways such as to click a mouse or press a button. The wristband will decode those signals and translate them into a digital signal your device can understand, empowering you with control over your digital life. It captures your intention so you can share a photo with a friend using an imperceptible movement or just by, well, intending to.”

Earlier this summer, Facebook presented a similar brain-computer interface technology on which it’s been working for the past two years. However, unlike the CTRL-labs technology, which involves using a wristband, Facebook’s technology was a little more invasive -- it required electrode implants in people’s brains. People would probably be more likely to trust something they can wear over something they have to stick in their brains.

Can You Trust Facebook?

Facebook is an advertising and social media company that makes money off of tracking as much about you online activities as possible. It then uses that collected data to attempt to predict the things in which you may be interested next, so the advertisers using its ad platform can target you more effectively. Being suspicious of the company's efforts to read people's minds--even in as limited a way as this--wouldn't be out of the question.

After all, the datr cookie was initially not supposed to be used for advertising purposes, nor were various other “security features” that Facebook lured users into using, either. However, Facebook has shown again and again that it considers very little (if any) of the data you shared with it to be sacred and not to be used for advertising purposes. How much data might the company be able to glean from a brain-computer interface like CTRL-labs'?

Razer isn’t a small start-up anymore. Founded in 2005, the company is one of the foremost brands in gaming culture, with its logo on peripherals, laptops, cases, smartphones and even an energy drink. Right after the debut of the Razer Blade Stealth 13, which Razer is touting as the first “gaming ultrabook,” I met with CEO and co-founder Min-Liang Tan at IFA in Berlin.

In a wide-ranging, half-hour interview, Tan discussed Razer’s relationship with Intel, interest in AMD, the effects of tariffs on the company’s goods, moving into gaming drinks and crossing over with other brands on PC hardware.

Oh, and we talked about the Razer toaster. We talked a surprising amount about the Razer toaster.

Razer’s European Tour

Razer’s workforce, according to Tan, is spread roughly in thirds across the United States, Europe and Asia. But its laptops were sold predominantly in the United States until just a few years ago.

“Today, in the U.S. we’re actually number one in the premium laptops above $1,800,” Tan said. “And in a very short - about, less than a year, we’ve taken leadership in markets like the U.K. at this point of time. And we’re doing incredibly well. So I think we’ve seen massive growth in Europe. I think there’s been a lot of interest in Razer laptops because we could actually even see back then there were many of the purchases in the U.S. being shipped across to Europe. So now we’re good and ready to launch over here. It’s been just a great time for us.”

A Category Outside of Project Athena

The newly announced Razer Blade Stealth 13 is among the first laptops with Intel’s 10th Gen Ice Lake processors, and the first with a 25-watt TDP. Both companies have called it a “gaming ultrabook.” But it’s not, however, fit to Intel’s Project Athena spec for performance, battery life and connectivity.

Tan told me that the company instead focuses on “our own standards... in terms of gaming laptops” rather than trying to conform to Intel’s new standard. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a close relationship with Intel, which supplies the processors in every single one of Razer’s laptops.

“Now we’ve worked very closely with Intel on the new Razer Blade. I mean if you look at ‘ultrabook’ it’s actually an Intel trademark[.],” he said. “So I think for all intents and purposes right now we’re very focused on creating our own category together with Intel for this “gaming ultrabook” category and you’ll probably see a lot more happening from that perspective.”

Intel CPU Shortages Hit Home

The generally relaxed Tan got a bit cagey when discussing Intel’s CPU shortages. But he ultimately revealed that Razer was affected.

“Well, I would say that I can’t talk specifically about it, but in the market I believe there’s been a shortage and things like that,” Tan said. “We’ve definitely been affected by it and I think, maybe what I can say is that we’ve had a lot more demand for our products than we can supply at this point of time. So we’re trying to work very closely with our component providers so that we can supply that.”

He laughed, adding, “I’m just dodging NDA’s here and there.”

Could AMD Come to Razer Blades?

Right now, Razer’s entire laptop lineup is comprised of notebooks with Intel processors. That’s not to say the company has no interest in AMD’s offerings, though.

“So we do have quite a number of customers reaching out to us asking us about AMD,” Tan said. “And especially in recent years, because AMD has been doing some pretty cool stuff I think, both on the CPU and GPU side of things. I think at this point of time we don’t have anything to disclose, but we’re definitely looking at AMD’s offerings very closely.”

Tariffs: Not Worried

Razer’s production is primarily in China, Tan said, but he didn’t seem too worried about tariffs imposed on many electronic goods by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Despite the fact that peripherals and laptops would fall under the existing lists, Tan said that Razer is working with manufacturers to avoid short term impacts, though he didn’t elaborate on how.

Razer does have some production in Taiwan, where it also has offices, Tan said. But he claimed the company has “no immediate plans” to move to other up and coming manufacturing hotspots in southeast Asia like Vietnam and Thailand.

When asked if he thinks Razer customers would be spared from paying more, he answered in one word: “Yes.”

But if tariffs do end up affecting the company, will consumers pay it, or will Razer swallow the costs?

“Well I don’t think we even need to look at it, because we don’t think it’s gonna happen,” he said.

DIY? Get a Buddy

At CES this year, Razer introduced the Raptor gaming monitor and a few cases, putting the company into the PC building market. Could Razer ever get into components?

“I think usually, when it comes down to PC DIY, we tend to partner,” Tan said. “I think, in fact if you look at our cases, we’ve actually partnered with NZXT, we’ve partnered with Lian Li, we’ve partnered with multiple other vendors,” he said. “Definitely I think you’ll see more partnerships. In respect to motherboards or RAM or things like that, many of which will revolve around Chroma. Because Chroma, for example, today is the biggest RGB platform in the world. We’ve got companies like MSI that we work with, AMD that we work with on Chroma. I think a lot of the partnerships will revolve around that.”

Razer has also previously worked with Lenovo on co-branded pre-built gaming desktops, prior to Lenovo introducing its Legion line-up, and he said he could see Razer doing a team-up in that space again if he saw something he liked.

Why team up, though? According to Tan, that’s because while Razer has a large research and development group, “we have a lot more people looking at the same product and designing for the same product than most other companies.” So when there’s an opportunity but a lack of resources or bandwidth, that’s a time Razer goes for the partnership.

The Birth of the Razer Toaster

“Well,” Tan said, letting out a sigh. “Where do I begin?”

The Razer toaster was originally just a 2016 April Fools’ joke. But people seemed to want it so badly that it became a meme. And Tan, the rare CEO who runs his own Facebook and other social media, engaged with those people.

“I’m part of a community, I don’t have a problem taking shit or you know, trolling somebody or stuff like that,” Tan said. ”So this guy Mark Withers started agitating for a toaster. The more he agitated for it, the more I decided to troll him about it. And I said look, get one million likes and we’ll see how many people want a toaster. And he was hovering at about 50,000 and stuff like that. Where occasionally when I would have time, I would pop in and say ‘just checking in to see how you losers are doing.’”

“Probably not the most professional thing a CEO should do, but hey, you know, I do that,” he added.

And that’s when the tattoos started.

“So at one point in time somebody said ‘hey, what if we got tattoos of the toaster?’ and I was like thinking, well, get me 10 tattoos and I’ll think about doing it, Tan recalled. “And I was like, how many idiots, how many people can you find to do a toaster tattoo?”

By that point, Tan said, people within the company were saying there should be a toaster. So Tan demanded ten tattoos, each worth 100,000 likes towards the total.

Tan has seen Razer tattoos before. He’s even seen his own name and face tattooed on people. But this surprised him.

“Oh my god,” he said, a pause after each syllable. “He got like 12 tattoos of a frickin’ Razer toaster…  Anyway, yeah, at some point I’m gonna have to start working on it. So we will have a Razer toaster. But it will be the best toaster in the world.”

How Does a Gaming Company Make a Toaster?

Tan says he is looking “begrudgingly” at the toaster. Apparently, it’s more interesting than he thought. It ends up, he doesn’t feel that there has been innovation in the toaster market in a long time.

“And curiously enough, now that I’m spending time looking at the toaster, there’s just so much we can do with the toaster. And I don’t even know why I’m having this conversation with you. But I am spending time looking at the toaster and there’s a team of people on it.”

Here’s the thing: you can’t just design a toaster with people who make gaming laptops and keyboards. He’ll definitely keep his design team on the job, because keeping peripherals, keyboards and even clothes in the same style is part of Razer’s ethos. But still, you need someone who knows toasters.

So he thinks Razer will hire some appliance people. But that may be just the first step in a whole line of kitchen appliances.

“Once I start bringing in home appliance people, it means I must have other home appliances, right?” Tan asked aloud. “Because I’m not going to hire somebody for a single project. So I’m still trying to get my mind around that. I think the next thing I’ve been asked for most is a mini-fridge.”

Razer: The Brand You Can Drink

If Razer ever makes a mini-fridge, maybe you can keep some Razer Respawn, the company’s gamer drink, in it.  Tan says it’s a success, and that it’s partly due to the Razer brand. Only a brand so identified with gamer culture could make this work, he said.

For instance: Would you drink something from Logitech?

“When we came up with a drink, it was something that everybody thought was cool [and] funny. But nobody said Razer shouldn’t be doing a drink,” he said. “But if you think about it, there are lots of great companies out there. Like Logitech make great peripherals, Dell makes great laptops. But would you drink a Logitech drink or a Dell drink? And if they came up with that, people would go like ‘huh? What?’ But when we came up with this, we’re so focused on the gamer lifestyle that when we came up with it they said ‘Respawn, I totally get it. It’s gonna work.’”

Tan promised that new flavors are coming, and said it’s the default drink in Razer’s U.S. offices (Respawn isn’t yet available in other markets).

The Future: Cloud Gaming and 5G?

When you’re the CEO of a company steeped in gaming, you have to be looking ahead. So when I picked his brain about the future, Tan told me his mind was on cloud gaming and 5G, the latter of which proved to be a big topic at IFA this year.

“I think with 5G coming up, it’s just this perfect confluence of technology coming aboard to be able to deliver a phenomenal experience,” he said. “I mean, for what it’s worth, cloud gaming is actually old news. It’s been around for a very long time. But I think with where 5G is -- low latency, high bandwidth -- there is so much that we can do. I mean at the end of the day I’m a tech guy and I get excited about tech, you know?”

The market is already starting to crowd with services from Google, Nvidia and Microsoft. Streaming, Tan said, is an area where Razer could again partner.

On Concept Projects: We Use That Tech

It’s hard to think about Razer, especially at a trade show, without thinking about the wild prototypes it has historically brought to the CES tradeshow in Las Vegas. Those, generally, haven’t come to market as consumer products. But Tan said that these are more like concept cars, and that they have taken some of the learnings and put them in hardware that we have seen.

“I’ll give you a case in point,” he said. “The first one that we ever showed off was Switchblade. And Switchblade [had] these dynamic keys that change behind a screen. That was actually put into our first laptop eight years ago.”

Indeed, Switchblade was shown off at CES in January 2011, and the laptop would be announced that fall with changeable buttons and a touchpad that doubled as an LCD display.

He also pointed to Project Christine, the CES 2014 concept that showed a PC broken into modular pieces that could be easily swapped. That, he says, can be seen in the Razer Core and Core X GPU enclosures, which let you plug in your own GPU and swap them out later.

Of course, some ideas may be good enough to launch. In fact, Razer apparently planned to announce a consumer release of one at IFA this year, but it got delayed in engineering. He wouldn’t commit to which project it was, but we’ll see it in a few months, he says. That sounds like it could be CES timing, which is almost ironic.

“I Think It’s Fine Until I Get Fired”

Towards the end of my 30 minutes with Tan, I couldn’t help but ask: how can you be so outspoken? He’s known for it, after all. What’s it like to occasionally troll on Facebook as a CEO?

“I don’t know -- I think it’s fine until I get fired, I guess,” he said. “I have this fatalistic approach that at some point in time I’m gonna say something, I’m gonna offend a whole lot of people and I’m probably gonna get fired but well, you know, life is short."

When asked if he ever runs this stuff by his legal team, he laughed.

“I must say that my PR team and my legal team lives on tenterhooks that I’m gonna say something stupid,” he laughed again. “So Maren [Epping, Razer’s PR lead of Europe, the Middle East and Africa] probably doesn’t get a lot of sleep.”

Some of this, he said, comes from the mentality that Razer is part of the gaming community. So he, to that end, will engage and interact, and expects others in the company will, too. If it’s a crime, it’s one of passion. It’s a startup mentality, despite the fact that there are 18 offices worldwide.

So yes, he’s afraid he’ll one day say something offensive. But he also considers it a duty. But his peers may question it from time to time.

“I mean, I’ve got meetings with other CEOs, and other CEOs go like, “what the hell are you doing?"

“You’re not supposed to say something like that. And if they said something like that they would get in trouble, but I’m getting away with it and stuff like that. I guess I’ve always seen Razer as being part of the community, built by the community. And we just don’t ever want to lose that.”

MORE: All Gaming Content

Most people would have a hard time convincing their bosses that playing Minecraft counts as working. MIT Technology Review reported yesterday that Facebook's latest virtual assistant will be able to do just that, however, because it was created to help Minecraft players with a variety of tasks. Why? Because the company wants to develop artificial intelligence that can learn how to do multiple things, rather than just one thing really well.

Most AI is currently restricted to a specific task. Companies develop systems capable of recognizing the subject of a photograph, for example, or wiping the floor with human players in Quake III. There's no denying the effectiveness of these AI once they're properly trained--which is why AI has become increasingly common in the tech industry--but those systems are specialized to the point that they're all but useless when given a different task.

Tech companies effectively created hammers that can swing themselves. Is that a neat trick? Sure. But there's a difference between carrying out a single task, like these AI do, and being truly intelligent. Even a self-swinging hammer is just a tool; a carpenter who knows how to use multiple tools is intelligent. (These are just generalizations, of course, and we're sure we aren't the only ones who've met people dumber than a door nail.)

Games offer researchers ways to create AI that isn't limited to a single task but also isn't expected to learn in an environment as chaotic as the real world. Minecraft offers players a lot of freedom, but even that freedom is found within a system that relies on clearly defined rules. AI can learn how these systems operate much easier than they'd be able to internalize the far more complex rules we humans deal with outside the physical realm.

MIT Technology review said Facebook imagined the Minecraft assistant taking instructions like "build a tower 15 blocks tall and then put a giant smiley on top" and learning how to achieve those goals. That's more complex than it seems: the AI has to define all of those terms, learn how to build the structure and figure out how to decorate it with a smiley face. It seems easy to us because we know what "tower" and "tall" and "smiley face" mean.

Facebook reportedly hopes the assistant would be able to learn from each of these interactions so it could eventually handle more and more tasks. Similar efforts could lead to dramatic improvements in AI that have nothing to do with Minecraft--imagine a voice assistant that could actually follow multi-step instructions rather than going back-and-forth with a string of single-step tasks. That would be far more convenient than current AI allows.

More information about Facebook's efforts can be found in the paper "Why Build an Assistant in Minecraft?" A beta version of the assistant--along with the datasets on which it relies--can be downloaded from GitHub. We'd explain where to find Minecraft, but with more than 176 million copies of the game sold as of this May, we suspect most people who'd be interested in an AI like the one described here already have the game installed.

Twitter said in a blog post that several privacy settings "may not have worked as intended" since 2018. By that it means technical failures led it to collect information--some of which it shared with its advertising partners--that its users explicitly told it not to via their settings.

The first setting related to information gathered when Twitter users interact with ads in the service's mobile app. The company said in its blog post that "if you clicked or viewed an advertisement for a mobile application and subsequently interacted with the mobile application since May 2018," it may have shared data with its "trusted" measurement or ad partners "even if you didn't give us permission to do so."

That data included the user's "country code, if you engaged with the ad and when,"plus "information about the ad" and more. It's collected to give Twitter more information about a "conversion event" that basically lets advertisers know their ads have proven effective. Twitter's reliance on advertising revenues makes proof of effectiveness important; companies aren't going to pay for ads nobody clicks.

The company said it also "may have shown you ads based on inferences we made about the devices you use, even if you did not give us permission to do so" as part of a process introduced in September 2018. This process was supposed to make the ads Twitter shows on its own platform, as well as other services, more relevant to their viewers. (Which, again, is meant to appease the ad companies it serves.)

Twitter said this information wasn't shared with other companies--which is a plus--and didn't include things like account credentials. More details about the inferences Twitter makes about its users can be found on the company's website. Those inferences are mostly supposed to make sure Twitter serves the same (or at least similar) advertisements to its users even if they switch between devices or browsers.

Companies that rely on ads often want to have their cake and eat it too. They introduce new tools for collecting more information that can be used to serve increasingly relevant ads but don't want people concerned about their privacy to abandon their services. So they allow users to opt out via their account settings. This is supposed to give people at least a modicum of control over their data.

But this disclosure shows that relying on settings to safeguard information requires faith in the company offering these services. Faith that privacy-related settings are working properly, faith that companies honor those settings and faith that those settings will remain available if a company struggles. There's no indication Twitter was acting in bad faith, but users might still question if their own faith was misplaced.

Twitter said that it fixed both of these problems on August 5. It said it's "still conducting our investigation to determine who may have been impacted," so it can't notify affected users or even guess how many people were affected, but it assured its users that "if we discover more information that is useful we will share it." That's a pretty big "if" when it comes to something as critical as privacy settings.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) isn't done with Facebook yet. After narrowly approving a $5 billion settlement for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the commission is now conducting an antitrust investigation into the social networking company, according to an August 1 report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The FTC is said to be particularly curious about how Facebook decides to acquire startups, like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook has reportedly acquired somewhere around 90 companies over the last 15 years. Not all of those acquisitions have been publicly announced--tech companies often buy startups just for their personnel--and many of the ones that are disclosed to the public don't attract much attention. But now the FTC is formally investigating claims that companies like Facebook acquire smaller companies with the intent of quashing potential competition.

Many have guessed that Facebook's most high-profile acquisitions were motivated by the company's fear that it would lose its hold on the social web. Instagram's popularity suggested the future of social networking was photo-based and mobile. WhatsApp then proved that many people preferred direct communication over public interaction. Buying the companies gave Facebook a way to benefit from services that were vastly different from its own.

Other acquisitions let Facebook improve its existing services with better facial recognition, video compression and other tools. Still others gave it early access to additional platforms--like Oculus did with VR--or let it dabble with new features, like online shopping. At least some of Facebook's acquisitions, one could argue, killed two birds with one stone by helping Facebook adapt to changing markets while simultaneously nixing potential competition.

Now the FTC is wondering if those arguments have merit. The commission is reportedly investigating claims that Facebook "purchased technology startups to keep them from challenging Facebook's empire," according to the WSJ's anonymous sources, who also said "the FTC has begun reaching out to the founders of such companies." 

But the FTC won't have to look far to hear some complaints from startup founders. Instagram's co-founders left the company in September 2018 because they reportedly had less independence from Facebook as time went on. WhatsApp co-founder Brian Actonsaid that same month that he was coached to tell European regulators the services wouldn't "blend" data, even though Facebook was trying to figure out how to share the information.

There are reasons why Facebook's led the social networking market far longer than any of its competitors; the FTC's investigation should help it figure out if being allowed to buy potential competitors for the last 15 years is one of them.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced this week that the Department’s Antitrust Division is reviewing “whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consumers.” The investigation will look into large technology companies with online services, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook.

The DOJ noted in a press release that over the past few years, concerns about search, social media, advertising-related tracking technologies and the practices of some online retail companies have grown significantly.

Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division said: 

“Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands.”

This Isn't Tech Giants' First Antitrust Rodeo

Some of these tech giants have already been involved in other antitrust cases. For instance, Google was reviewed in 2011, and the FTC’s investigators ended up recommending antitrust action against the company over their findings, which included anti-competitive tactics that allegedly led to the death of Google Maps competitor Skyhook. However, Google escaped an antitrust lawsuit at the last minute, with FTC Chairman at the time Jon Leibowit ruling against the lawsuit.

Google wasn’t so fortunate in the European Union (EU), where the European Commission launched not one, but three antitrust cases against the company related to its shopping comparison service, Android domination and Google Ads' anti-competitive practices.

Facebook’s largest privacy scandal exploded last year with the revelations about its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, a firm that exploited Facebook’s data APIs to build political profiles on users and manipulate them through ads.

The FTC has now found that Facebook violated its previous settlement with the FTC on multiple occasions, including when it lied to users about facial recognition being turned off and when it was asking users for phone numbers for “security purposes” and then using those numbers for advertising purposes.

The DOJ may also review Amazon’s e-commerce practices. Meanwhile, the EU has recently announced its own antitrust investigation into Amazon, accusing the company of anti-competitive tactics against sellers of its own platform, as well as data collection practices that may violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The Supreme Court recently ruled that Apple can be sued by its own customers  (and not just iOS developers, as Apple would have preferred) over antitrust issues connected to its App Store. The Supreme Court said that Apple’s 30% fee on each application is an abuse of monopoly power, because the fee is passed down to its customers, inflating prices.

Usually, it's the FTC that prosecutes antitrust cases; the DOJ hasn't had a high-profile antitrust case since it prosecuted Microsoft in 2011. This could be read in different ways: perhaps the DOJ is as serious about these cases as it was about the Microsoft case. Or maybe it's trying to gain points with a public growing weary of the power of tech giants. 

Update, 7/24/19, 9:35 a.m. PT: The FTC today announced that it's reached a settlement with Facebook through which the company will pay a $5 billion fine, which the commission said is "one of the largest penalties ever assessed by the U.S. government for any violation," and change its corporate structure in an effort to better protect user privacy. Facebook will also be subject to new restrictions on its use of user data; the FTC said the settlement "overhauls the way the company makes privacy decisions by boosting the transparency of decision making and holding Facebook accountable via overlapping channels of compliance."

“Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers’ choices,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in the commission's announcement. “The magnitude of the $5 billion penalty and sweeping conduct relief are unprecedented in the history of the FTC. The relief is designed not only to punish future violations but, more importantly, to change Facebook’s entire privacy culture to decrease the likelihood of continued violations. The Commission takes consumer privacy seriously, and will enforce FTC orders to the fullest extent of the law.”

More information about the settlement is available via the FTC's website (PDF). The commission said that it filed a separate complaint regarding Cambridge Analytica--whose use of Facebook data led to increased scrutiny of the social network's practices and, ultimately, this settlement--The FTC said its complaint alleges that the firm "employed deceptive tactics to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting." The FTC has proposed settlements with Cambridge Analytica's former CEO and app developer. The filing is on the commission's website (PDF).

Original article, 7/13/19, 7:44 a.m. PT:

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal that erupted in 2018. FTC commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of the settlement, which is also expected to include more careful regulations that are meant to protect the privacy of Facebook users, although it's not yet clear what those additional restrictions might be.

This settlement is supposed to resolve the Justice Department's investigation into Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That scandal erupted in 2018 after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica took advantage of Facebook's lackadaisical approach to protecting user privacy so it could gather data from 50 million people. That revelation prompted several others that eventually led to international scrutiny of Facebook's practices.

If the Justice Department approves the settlement--and it usually sides with the FTC on these matters--it would be the largest fine U.S. regulators have ever issued a tech company. It's not even a real competition, either, with the second-largest being a $22 million fine issued to Google in 2012. Yet critics have said the FTC should have done more, with Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) saying in a tweet that the settlement was "a Christmas present" to Facebook.

Cicilline said in another tweet that $5 billion is "a fraction of Facebook's annual revenue" that "won't make them think twice about their responsibility to protect user data." That's actually an understatement--the company said it brought in revenues of roughly $15 billion in the first quarter of 2019. It has more than $40 billion in cash reserves, too, which means it could theoretically pay this $5 billion settlement another seven times over with cash alone.

Does that mean Facebook wants to be fined $5 billion a quarter through 2021? Probably not; that would be weird. But it does mean the privacy abuses that prompted this settlement have essentially become little more than accounting problems. The company already warned shareholders in the first quarter of 2019 that it expected this settlement to end up somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion. Such is the cost of doing business.

The New York Times reported that the new restrictions imposed on Facebook as part of the settlement were also weaker than some expected:

"In addition to the fine, Facebook agreed to more comprehensive oversight of how it handles user data, according to the people. But none of the conditions in the settlement will impose strict limitations on Facebook’s ability to collect and share data with third parties. And that decision appeared to help split the five-member commission. The 3-to-2 vote, taken in secret this week, drew the dissent of the two Democrats on the commission because they sought stricter limits on the company, the people said."

Criticism of this settlement will likely draw attention to the core problem with regulating tech companies like Facebook. They are so massive--and exploiting the privacy of their users is so lucrative--that even a $5 billion settlement would merely be a line-item in their quarterly results. How many such settlements would these companies have to violate for regulators to do more than just tack a few zeroes onto the previous fine? Ask us in 2027.

Neither the FTC nor Facebook have publicly commented on the settlement or the reports describing it.

Complaining about something on social media is easier than contending with official customer support channels. That naturally leads to even more public complaints, of course, which is why many companies have dedicated customer support accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Intel announced yesterday that it's expanding its official customer support to another social platform: Reddit.

Don't worry, Intel won't be forcing some underpaid intern to spend the entire day responding to Reddit trolls. (We say "underpaid" because, frankly, it's hard to imagine any amount of money justifying the psychological damage inflicted by such an assignment.) The company said it would be limiting its feedback to the Intel subreddit in a monthly thread dedicated specifically to technical support inquiries submitted in a predetermined template.

"We've created this thread to be a hub for Technical Support problems for ALL your Intel products where you can directly report your issues to Intel," the company said. "Why post here? Intel actively monitors this thread to collect feedback and fix bugs regarding user problems. Posting here will help Intel learn about your issues and work on solutions. [...] **We may not respond to each issue or question immediately - but we are listening!**"

Intel made it clear that it's "testing and building out [its] support queues for Reddit" with this first "beta" thread. The company also poked fun at the way most people complain about technical issues by specifically telling Reddit users not to report problems with comments like "Fortnite keeps crashing. Your drivers suck! Smh Intel." (Which, as a Reddit user myself, seems like exactly the kind of thing Intel's likely to receive via threads like this one.)

This seems like another olive branch from Intel to PC enthusiasts. The company introduced an initiative called The Odyssey in February to connect with enthusiasts via a newsletter, community and series of live events. However, the Odyssey required people to sign up for something new, while this new thread on the Intel subreddit will allow the company to meet enthusiasts where they've already congregated.

After President Trump’s recent negative comments on cryptocurrency, including Facebook’s Libra digital currency, the U.S. House has prepared a bill that would essentially ban big tech companies from being involved in any way in the finance industry. The move seems primarily directed at Facebook’s involvement in the Libra project.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned that digital currencies such as Facebook’s Libra or even more conventional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin pose a threat to national security. 

“Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been exploited to support billions of dollars of illicit activity like cybercrime, tax evasion, extortion, ransomware, illicit drugs, and human trafficking," 

He added that cryptocurrencies "could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers.”

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Fed chair Jerome Powell, also said recently that the Libra project “cannot go forward” until “serious concerns” are addressed. Facebook’s David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s Calibra, responded in a recent testimony for the US Senate Banking Committee that the Libra Association will be regulated under Swiss law. The Libra Association will be the organization that will govern the Libra digital currency and will be headquartered in Switzerland. 

However, Marcus also said that American services that will use the Libra digital currency, including Facebook’s own Calibra wallet for the Libra currency, will still be governed by U.S. money transmitting laws. 

U.S. House Goes after Big Tech-Run Cryptocurrencies

Some members of Congress and government officials people have made it no secret that they don’t like Libra or conventional cryptocurrencies because they believe they are a threat not just to national security, but also to the U.S. dollar. Libra will attempt to fulfill Bitcoin’s vision of a world digital currency, but instead of being a fully decentralized cryptocurrency, the Libra currency will be controlled by some of the largest technology companies. 

Facebook will spearhead its development and likely control the future of the Libra currency for the foreseeable future, not unlike Google has managed to be the primary developer and the company in charge of the Android Open Source Project.

Although Facebook has promised that Libra will not pose a threat to national currencies, the U.S. House doesn’t want to take any chances. Some Democrats, led by Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), have begun to consider a new bill, called Keep Big Tech Out of Finance Act, for an introduction on the House floor.

If the bill passes and becomes law, Facebook may be forced to cut its ties to the Libra Association, at least in the United States. The bill also bans other “large platform utilities,” defined as tech companies making over $25 billion in revenue a year from being affiliated with a financial institution.

Even if Facebook cuts its losses in the U.S. and attempts to provide Libra currency elsewhere, it probably won’t have too much success. Several European national governments have also pushed back against Libra, warning that it must not be allowed to become a sovereign currency or to replace the euro.

Security incidents often follow a familiar pattern. Companies find out they weren't as secure as they thought, inform their users about the issue and later discover the incident affected more people than originally estimated. Facebook's disclosure of problems with the way it stored passwords followed that same pattern, with the company revealing yesterday that millions of Instagram users were also affected by its security blunder.

Facebook originally said in March that up to 20,000 employees could have accessed the passwords of more than 600 million people. They wouldn't even have to do anything to make the data readable either because it was stored in plain text. The company essentially left keys to the digital lives of half a billion people lying around for any of its employees to use as they saw fit. We're pretty sure that's the opposite of secure.

Then, on April 18 the company updated its March blog post with more information: "Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed."

The company didn't say when it discovered that Instagram users were also affected; it could've been anytime between March 21 and April 18. Nor did Facebook mention the issue on social media, republish the blog post to make it clear that it was updated, or inform journalists of the change. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to think Facebook was hoping the media would be focusing its attention elsewhere so this disclosure would go unnoticed.

This disclosure perfectly matches the process we outlined above. At this point it's probably safe to assume a few things whenever companies disclose security incidents. It's seems like they're always worse than they expect, they're always going to downplay the severity of an incident and there's always the chance that further disclosures go unnoticed because they were made when people shifted their attention to whatever's grabbing headlines.

Regulators realized that fining tech companies hundreds of thousands of dollars--or even several million dollars--isn't enough to stop them from breaking the law. Russia appears to have missed that memo, though, because a court in Moscow today issued a 3,000 ruble fine to Facebook over violating data privacy laws that require companies to store data about their Russian users on servers located in the country. That's about $50.

This might be the rare case where it's easier to side with Facebook than a regulator when it comes to privacy concerns. Protecting the privacy of Russian citizens from foreign spying might be part of the reason why these laws are in effect. But it's possible the Russian government simply wants to be able to access information about its citizens without international scrutiny.

Breaking the law for a good reason is still breaking the law, though, so it shouldn't be too detrimental to take this fine at face value. (At least not on a tech news site--determining the morals of this particular rule or Facebook's breaking of it is above our pay grade.) That's where a $50 fine on a company with a $511 billion market cap and whose share price is $179.10 at time of writing, seems like either a typo or a bad joke.

Just consider some of the other fines recently levied against tech companies. Facebook was fined £500,000 (roughly $642,000) in October 2018 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the fine was only that low because the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) had to rely on an old law instead of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted last year. Google was fined a record €1.5 billion (about $1.7 billion) in March.

For comparison: Russia would have to issue its $50 fine another 34 million times for it to match Google's recent fine. That might seem laughable, but that's only because the case isn't really about the fine. ZDNet noted that this is just the beginning of a process that could eventually block Facebook from Russia entirely, and regardless of how one feels about the service, good things don't usually follow efforts to block communication tools.

The idea that this is about more than a symbolic fine meant to convince Facebook the Russian government means business is supported by the fact that Russia issued the same fine to Twitter last week. Russia blocked LinkedIn in 2016, and Google+ is finally dead, so Facebook and Twitter are the two main Western social media platforms allowed in the country. 

It's uncanny; it almost seems like someone gave Facebook a heads-up that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) wasn't happy. Just nine days after the company said it was "doing more to protect against discrimination in housing, employment and credit advertising" it was charged with violating the Fair Housing Act.

Not that it would have taken a lot of foresight to predict this--the Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity filed a complaint about Facebook with HUD in August 2018. Now, the department has accused Facebook of "encouraging, enabling and causing housing discrimination" with its advertising platform.

"HUD alleges that Facebook unlawfully discriminates based on race, color, national origin, religion, familial status, sex and disability by restricting who can view housing-related ads on Facebook’s platforms and across the internet," HUD explained in its announcement today.

"Further, HUD claims Facebook mines extensive data about its users and then uses those data to determine which of its users view housing-related ads based, in part, on these protected characteristics."

There's nothing revelatory about those accusations. Facebook relies on advertising, and marketers pay to advertise to specific demographics. ProPublica has even published numerous reports on how Facebook's ad platform enables housing discrimination since 2016.

What makes HUD's charges interesting, then, isn't that they reveal a problem with Facebook's advertising practices. It's that the company is actually being formally charged with a crime for those practices. It's like finally watching a bully get sent to the principal after getting away with everything for years.

Facebook tried to stave off HUD's criticism on March 19 when it revealed a settlement with various civil rights groups that had filed legal complaints about its platform enabling housing, credit and employment discrimination. The company said in a March 19 blog post about the settlement that it would enforce these rules:

• "Anyone who wants to run housing, employment or credit ads will no longer be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code.
• Advertisers offering housing, employment and credit opportunities will have a much smaller set of targeting categories to use in their campaigns overall. Multicultural affinity targeting will continue to be unavailable for these ads. Additionally, any detailed targeting option describing or appearing to relate to protected classes will also be unavailable.
• We’re building a tool so you can search for and view all current housing ads in the US targeted to different places across the country, regardless of whether the ads are shown to you."

The problem is that those rules are self-imposed. Facebook has repeatedly — time and time again — damaged the trust of its users; making the value of its promises questionable at best.

HUD's complaint at least has the possibility of leading to restrictions being enforced by government regulators, instead of the social network's seemingly scant conscience.

Who remembers what they shared to Myspace? Well, apparently even the company doesn't know, because it seems to have lost all of the files uploaded to its social network between 2003 and 2015.

Reddit user "JodiXD" said in 2018 that the Myspace player wouldn't load some of the songs they'd uploaded. JodiXD then provided an update saying that Myspace support told them:

"There is an issue with all songs/videos uploaded over three years ago. We are aware of the issue, and I have been informed the issue will be fixed, however, there is no exact time frame for when this will be completed. Until this is resolved the option to download is not available. I apologize for the inconvenience this may be causing." That message was purportedly sent on February 1, 2018.

Four months later, another Reddit user pointed out that Myspace had updated its music player with a warning at the top of the page regarding the status of these old-for-the-internet files:

"As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer, Dr. Jana Jentzsch at DPO@myspace.com."

Just to show exactly how irrelevant Myspace is--even though it now seems to be an entertainment news site--the issue was overlooked until a thread was posted in the Technology subreddit yesterday.

We've reached out to Myspace to see if it will offer any more information about how much data was lost and why it didn't have a backup of the data ready in case the server migration failed.

In the meantime, this should be a good wake-up call to all the people who used to use Myspace and currently use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. to keep local copies of important files.

The claim that "the internet is forever" is a lie. Websites shut down, files are lost, and countless other issues can make data inaccessible. Do what Myspace didn't and learn from its mistakes

Facebook's promises are getting harder and harder to believe. Despite telling people that phone numbers used for two-factor authentication (2FA) wouldn't be used for anything else, it's been revealed that the company also uses those numbers to help Facebook users find people's accounts, and there's no way to prevent that process.

We already knew that Facebook had lied about only using phone numbers gathered via 2FA setup for security purposes: researchers discovered in September 2018 that Facebook used those numbers to inform targeted advertisements. This wasn't disclosed to users.

But the ability to find someone's Facebook account with their phone number was only publicized Friday by Jeremy Burge, chief emoji officer at Emojipedia, an emoji reference website. He explained in a series of tweets that Facebook lets its users decide if their phone numbers can be used this way by everyone, friends of friends, or friends. There's no opting out.

Worse still is the fact that this option is set to "everyone" by default. At this point, it's not clear how Facebook's decision to stop using phone numbers in its search results benefited users, since this new feature essentially does the same thing. 

Facebook also apparently shares numbers used for 2FA with its other services. Burge shared a screenshot of Instagram, which Facebook owns, asking him to confirm a phone number that he only shared with Facebook to set up 2FA on an account. Numbers are also shared with WhatsApp, another Facebook property, the whistleblower said.

Plus, Facebook's reportedly looking to merge the back-end of all these services.

Want to comment on this story? Let us know what you think in the Tom's Hardware Forums.

Facebook's chief artificial intelligence researcher told Bloomberg the company is working on a new semiconductor design made specifically to handle the mass amounts of data used by AI.

The researcher, Yann LeCun, is also a computer science professor at New York University who specializes in deep learning. So he's well-placed to help solve the hardware limitations AI researchers must face. "We don’t want to leave any stone unturned," LeCun told Bloomberg, "particularly if no one else is turning them over."

LeCun reportedly said that Facebook wants to develop semiconductors that can better train deep learning algorithms by manipulating data all at once instead of having to break it down into manageable tasks. (Essentially: Facebook wants its AI to eat the metaphorical cake in a single bite instead of slicing it up.)

These chips would, ideally, let deep learning algorithms quickly train smarter AI. It would also have the benefit of allowing Facebook to rely on its own hardware instead of buying off-the-shelf products from other companies. That way the company would be able to develop its AI hardware and software in tandem.

We already knew that Facebook planned to help design its own AI chips: Bloomberg reported last April that it was hiring a hardware team to design its own silicon. The company also announced at CES 2019 that it was working on the Intel Nervana Neural Network Processor for Inference alongside Intel.

But there's a difference between working on a chip with a company like Intel and designing a new kind of semiconductor. It will be interesting to see where Facebook takes this project in the future. The company's known for taking on massive projects only to significantly roll back or outright cancel them a few years in.

Twitch is the reigning king of the streaming market, but plenty of services are looking to claim the throne for themselves. That list of wannabe rulers includes Facebook Gaming, the social network’s service-within-a-service, which is attempting to bolster its position today by announcing a partnership with the popular Streamlabs platform.

Streamlabs offers a variety of tools for streamers: alerts that enable audience interaction, the Streamlabs OBS broadcasting software and other services made specifically for livestreaming. It’s also expanded its platform in recent months by partnering with Intel and introducing an app store exclusively for streamers.

Now that Streamlabs has partnered with Facebook Gaming to enable the following features in the Streamlabs OBS app:

• Embedded Chat: This widget adds an overlay to streams to drive chat interaction visibility for everyone, no matter where or when past streams are being played.
• Auto-fill Stream Information: This feature pulls and pre-fills stream info (title, description, etc.) from either a scheduled stream or your last stream.
• Automated Notification: Because Facebook allows you to stream up to four hours per session, they've implemented a warning message when you are approaching the stream limit.
• Stream Schedule: When you schedule a live video, an announcement post will be published to your News Feed letting fans on Facebook know the broadcast is coming. 

Streamlabs is also working on Facebook-specific features, like alerts for when someone “Likes,” follows or shares a stream. The company didn’t offer an estimated release date for these alerts; it only said they’re “coming soon.” That feels like a glaring omission at launch, but at least Facebook Gaming streamers have something to look forward to.

Now the bad news: streaming to Facebook Gaming requires a dedicated Page rather than just a normal Facebook account. It’s not hard to set one up, but compared to streaming on other platforms, it is an additional barrier between streamers and viewers. Streamlabs can’t really do anything about that, but it could still be mildly frustrating.

We aren’t exactly clear on why someone would choose to stream to Facebook Gaming instead of another platform. Twitch has the dedicated streaming audience, YouTube has more focus on videos and other streaming platforms have the benefit of not being on the same place where people share political memes and recipe GIFs.

But we aren’t ones to stop streamers from following their wishes. And thanks to this partnership between Facebook Gaming and Streamlabs, now they’ll have more tools available for their apparent platform of choice. The features are available now via Streamlabs OBS.

Updated, 12/21/2018, 12:10pm PT: A Netflix spokesperson provided the following statement to Tom's Hardware: "Over the years we have tried various ways to make Netflix more social. One example of this was a feature we launched in 2014 that enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix. It was never that popular so we shut the feature down in 2015. At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so." (Emphasis theirs.)

Updated, 12/20/2018, 7:10am PT: Facebook published another blog post about Netflix, Spotify, Dropbox, and the Royal Bank of Canada's access to user messages. The company said these partners were only given read, write, and delete access to user messages because those permissions were required to enable messaging features in the other companies' services. (Such as sending a song via Spotify or a movie via Netflix.) Facebook said the "partnerships were agreed via extensive negotiations and documentation, detailing how the third party would use the API, and what data they could and couldn’t access." It also claimed the features were experimental and had been shut down "for nearly three years."

Original article, 12/19/2018, 7:54am PT:

Facebook has become part of the fabric of the internet. That's partly because people use the platform to create accounts with new services, share things with their friends and receive custom-tailored experiences based on their interests. But a New York Times investigation this week has revealed that it's also because Facebook partnered with more than 150 companies between 2010 and 2017 to offer them access to its data without first informing users.

The list of partners named in the report is a who's-who of tech companies. The New York Times said Amazon could find users' names and contact information via their friends; that Bing could "see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent"; that Netflix and Spotify could read users' private messages; and that Yahoo could "view streams of friends’ posts" even though Facebook publicly said it had ended that practice.

Facebook is also said to have shared information with media companies, online retailers and automakers, among other tech companies. The full extent of these data partnerships was never revealed to Facebook's users, leading The New York Times and several privacy experts to claim the practice violated the social media platform's 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to only share data with explicit consent.

This is the latest in a string of privacy-related controversies involving Facebook in 2018. The most notable was the Cambridge Analytica scandal that inspired lawmakers around the world to finally scrutinize Facebook's handling of approximately 2.2 billion people's personal information. But the company also came under fire after another New York Times report on its data partnerships and for numerous bugs that exposed private data.

Facebook's Response

Facebook responded to the recent New York Times' report, with most of its defense essentially being that the reports merely described APIs that enabled features its users wanted. The rest mostly comes down to neglect--it simply failed to remove APIs related to shuttered programs--and claims that it was unfair for The New York Times to complain about things it ended a few months ago when they were first revealed to the public.

"To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC," Facebook said, adding "Our integration partners had to get authorization from people. You would have had to sign in with your Facebook account to use the integration offered by Apple, Amazon or another integration partner."

There's likely some truth to Facebook's claims. Compelling features often require access to more information than people expect, and when that data-sharing is explained in layman's terms, things they were fine with suddenly become outrageous. But the company's been spewing hogwash about user privacy for so long that it's hard to even visit its social network without breathing in the faint smell of insecurity. 

The reality is that few people outside Facebook--including the company's own partners--know the extent to which it shares user data. Several companies told The New York Times they never knew they had special access to certain data, that they didn't realize they still had that access, or that they didn't plan to use their access but had it anyway. Either they're lying to escape criticism or Facebook and its "partners" are estranged.

Facebook brings in £500,000 easily. At this point, even if everyone at the company disappeared via technological rapture, its ad platform would still churn out cash. That makes the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) £500,000 ($641,878) fine against the company over the Cambridge Analytica incident seem inconsequential, but that's actually the highest fine the regulator can levy. And on top of that, Facebook also has a class-action lawsuit on its hands. 

Here's a quick recap: Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have collected information about 50 million people in the U.S. by exploiting Facebook's laissez-faire data policies. This in turn raised questions about those policies and how Facebook planned to make sure researchers weren't gathering--and using--people's information without oversight. (You can learn more about the ins and outs of the controversy in our round-up.)

Regulators around the world quickly criticized Facebook over this failure. ICO announced in July that it planned to levy the maximum £500,000 fine against Facebook over the scandal; now it's actually issued that fine. While that may seem low, especially in light of the stricter GDPR rules that went into effect in May, the regulator noted that it issued the highest fine it could based on the previous Data Protection Act legislation.

That's because the incidents that provoked the fine occurred between 2007 and 2014. Instead of retroactively applying GDPR, which would incur a much higher fine, ICO had to rely on a decade-old law.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham explained:

“We considered these contraventions to be so serious we imposed the maximum penalty under the previous legislation. The fine would inevitably have been significantly higher under the GDPR. One of our main motivations for taking enforcement action is to drive meaningful change in how organisations handle people’s personal data. ... Our work is continuing. There are still bigger questions to be asked and broader conversations to be had about how technology and democracy interact and whether the legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks we have in place are adequate to protect the principles on which our society is based.”

Class-Action Lawsuit Against Facebook

But there are signs that Facebook users aren't content to wait around for regulators to manage Facebook and other companies' data practices. A class-action lawsuit filed late last week complains that Facebook continued to track users' location via its smartphone apps and share it with advertisers even if they disabled that feature. Claiming Facebook violated the U.S. Federal Stored Communications Act, the lawsuit, in part, seeks $1,000 per violation of that act, an explanation of how affected users were impacted, destruction of user data accumulated and a commitment to not do these acts again. This is the latest in a long series of lawsuits; maybe they'll help nudge things in the direction of privacy reform.

Facebook originally estimated that up to 50 million people were affected by an attack on the site announced on September 28 and shrank that number down to 30 million a few weeks later. This week, a report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) claimed that Facebook has internally blamed the attack on spammers.

Facebook discovered the attack on September 25 and publicly revealed it on September 28. The company released an update on October 12 with its revised estimate for the number of people affected by the attack, but it has yet to share any information about the attackers with the public. The FBI, which is assisting with the investigation into the attack, is said to have asked Facebook not to discuss the attackers' identities.

Quoth the Journal: "Internal researchers now believe that the people behind the attack are a group of Facebook and Instagram spammers that present themselves as a digital marketing company, and whose activities were previously known to Facebook’s security team, said the people familiar with the investigation." Facebook has repeatedly declined to confirm or deny WSJ's report or discuss the attackers' identities.

This attribution is supported by the attackers' decision to compromise a limited amount of information that was available to them. Facebook said the attack relied on a vulnerability in the "View As" feature that lets people view their profiles from other perspectives. Once that vulnerability was exploited, the attackers could steal the access tokens used to let people use their accounts without having to log in every time to do so. The social media platform's vulnerability existed between July 2017 and September 2018.

The attackers could have wreaked havoc with those access tokens, but according to Facebook's update on the attack, they were mostly concerned with stealing contact information (of which Facebook has even more than most people expect). This data would prove particularly valuable to spammers who make their living by contacting as many people as possible.

In any case, this is the biggest attack in Facebook's history, and this almost certainly won't be the last we hear of it.

It's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to data breaches. While overstating the problem runs the risk of inspiring panic, understating it can lull people into believing it wasn't that big a deal. Facebook opted for the first approach in September when it revealed an attack that it believed affected 50 million and may have impacted 40 million. But today, it said only 30 million people were truly affected. Also interesting is that it seems whether or not Facebook knows who the crooks were, the U.S. government has asked it to keep their identity mum.

The attack exploited a vulnerability in Facebook's network that existed from July 2017 to September 2018. The company suspected an attack on September 14, confirmed it on September 25 and patched the problem by September 27. It publicly revealed the issue on September 28.

Facebook also notified the FBI, which is currently investigating the issue and has asked the company not to discuss who may be responsible for the attack:

"We’re cooperating with the FBI, which is actively investigating and asked us not to discuss who may be behind this attack," Facebook said.

In addition, Facebook said it's cooperating with U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Irish Data Protection Commission and "other authorities".

What Happened?

Facebook said the vulnerability resulted from "a complex interaction of three distinct software bugs" involving the "View As" feature that lets people see how much information their profile exposes to people they aren't friends with on the website. The attackers could exploit this vulnerability to compromise the access tokens used to let people use Facebook without having to sign in every time. Those access tokens could then be used to take over accounts.

The attackers were said to have already had control over several accounts. They used those accounts to steal information from their friends and their friends of friends to affect roughly 400,000 people in the first wave. Repeating that process ultimately led to 30 million accounts being affected by the attack. That's fewer than Facebook anticipated, which is welcome news, but it still means a lot of people were compromised by the hack.

Facebook said the unidentified group didn't collect the same information about everyone affected by their attack. The company broke it down:

"For 15 million people, attackers accessed two sets of information – name and contact details (phone number, email, or both, depending on what people had on their profiles). For 14 million people, the attackers accessed the same two sets of information, as well as other details people had on their profiles. This included username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow and the 15 most recent searches. For 1 million people, the attackers did not access any information."

The company was also careful to note that this attack only affected Facebook proper, not Instagram, Oculus, et cetera. Facebook users can see if they were affected by checking the Help Center; Facebook also plans to notify the 30 million affected users to "explain what information the attackers might have accessed, as well as steps they can take to help protect themselves, including from suspicious emails, text messages, or calls."

Unfortunately the ramifications of this vulnerability won't be fully revealed with this report. Facebook still has to determine if smaller attacks were able to compromise access tokens via the "View As" feature and will also continue its investigation into this attack. Data breaches often grow in scope as companies do more digging, so while the shift from 50 million down to 30 million is promising, it's also not the whole story.

According to a WSJ report, Google’s social media service, Google+, exposed the private profile data of almost 500,000 users for the past three years; however, the company opted not to tell anyone about it, fearing that it would face both reputation damage as well as new regulations.

Undisclosed User Data Exposure

Google learned in March that a software vulnerability that has existed in its Google+ service since 2015 could have allowed malicious third-party app developers to access users’ private profile information.

The company discovered the issue right when the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal was still fresh on everyone’s minds. At the time, multiple governments were scrutinizing Facebook over its data practices, and, according to WSJ's report, this seems to be the reason why Google failed to disclose its security issue to the public.

A memo by Google’s legal and policy team to the company’s senior executives and obtained by WSJ said that disclosing the incident would trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparison to Facebook’s scandal. After an internal committee had already reached the decision not to disclose the privacy and security issue to the public, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was also notified.

Google told WSJ that it came to the conclusion not to disclose the issue based on several factors, including whether the company could accurately identify the impacted users, whether there was any evidence of misuse and whether there was any action the users could have taken. The company said that “none of those thresholds were met.” The internal memo from the legal and policy staff said that the company had no evidence of any attack exploiting this vulnerability, but there was also no way to know for sure.

The exposed private profile data included full names, email addresses, birth dates, gender, profile photos, places lived, occupation and relationship status.

According to WSJ’s report, the Google+ privacy issue was due to an API that allowed third-party developers to collect users’ friends data, even if that data was set to non-public. When a user granted a developer permission to their profile, any of the data related to that profile could be collected by the developer. This is very similar to how Cambridge Analytica was able to collect data on millions of users too. Although it’s not able to tell whether or not apps misused user data, Google said that up to 438 applications had access to unauthorized Google+ data.

Google+ Shuts Down

Considering that Google+ has been considered a bit of a ghost town for years already, it’s not too surprising to see it shut down. However, it’s still interesting to see the company is making this decision now, after the privacy issue became public. 

The company told WSJ that shutting down Google+ is part of a recent effort to limit third-party developers access to its users’ data, including Gmail add-on developers and Android app developers.

Google said that only Gmail add-on developers that pass security audits will be allowed to continue accessing users' Gmail accounts, while “most” third-party Android developers will no longer receive access to users’ SMS messages, call logs and some additional forms of contact data on Android devices. Previous reports have found that some third-party Gmail add-on developers were reading users’ emails, supposedly to improve their algorithms.

Google CEO to Testify In Congress

Google’s lawyers advised the company’s executives, including its CEO, to avoid public disclosure of this privacy issue because the company was “not legally required” to do so. Unlike in the EU, where data breach notices are mandatory within three days of the event due to laws such as the recently passed GDPR, the U.S. doesn’t yet have federal laws regulating data breach notices.

Google also feared that disclosing the Google+ privacy issue would mean that CEO Sundar Pichai would have to testify in Congress, just as Mark Zuckerberg did. In fact, some senators did call for Google’s CEO to appear in a data privacy hearing earlier this spring. Pichai has refused to testify multiple times since then, but he recently agreed to testify in the U.S. House in the coming weeks.

An attack on Facebook's network led to a breach affecting nearly 50 million of the social network's users, the New York Times reports.

On Facebook's blog, vice president of product management Guy Rosen wrote that the account was discovered on Sept. 25. It was based on the "View As" feature, which lets users see how their profiles appear to others.

The Times reports that it involved an exploit that allowed attackers to take over user accounts. Facebook told the newspaper that it doesn't know who the hackers are or where they came from, and that it has not "fully assessed the scope of the attack."

Facebook fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement, but also automatically logged out more than 90 million Facebook users to ensure only the actual users can get into their accounts. Rosen wrote that that includes "almost 50 million accounts we know were affected to protect their security," as well as another 40 million that were "subject to a 'View As'" in the last year.

"[I]f we find more affected accounts, we will immediately reset their access tokens," Rosen wrote. He also claims that "there’s no need for anyone to change their passwords," though doing so is never a bad idea.

This isn't the first security scandal Facebook has faced this year. In March, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, in which a data-mining firm got as many as 87 million Facebook users' personal information through a third-party app, some of which may have been used to craft and target ads for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. Since then, Facebook reduced what it shared with those apps, but it is still struggling to regain the trust of many users.

WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton went silent after tweeting in March that "It is time. #deletefacebook." That may have seemed like an odd tweet from someone who made billions of dollars by selling his company to Facebook in 2014. In an interview Forbes published this week, however, Acton made it clear that making a lot of money was pretty much the only thing he and Facebook agreed on even before the $22 billion deal closed.

The most telling quote from the Forbes interview is this: "At the end of the day, I sold my company. I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.” The rest of the interview tells a story of two very different companies--one that highly valued user privacy and one that prioritized ad revenues--attempting to reconcile their differences.

Acton noted that Facebook "isn't the bad guy" in this situation. The company was looking to offer the most possible information to advertisers, and the push-back from Acton and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum on incorporating ads in the messaging app or using its data to inform ads on Facebook was bound to cause problems. So many, in fact, that Acton left $850 million on the table by leaving Facebook when he did.

The issues started before WhatsApp and Facebook even closed their deal. Acton said he was coached to tell European regulators that the two companies wouldn't "blend" data so the deal would be approved. Meanwhile, teams at Facebook were figuring out how exactly they would blend that information, he said. Rights groups, regulators and others later discovered this data-sharing and criticized the companies for deceiving their users.

Later, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said that WhatsApp vowed not to share data with Facebook until doing so would comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That announcement was made four years after the acquisition was finalized--something that was supposed to be true from the moment the ink dried (and even then only for users protected by GDPR).

Acton said he and Koum later bristled at Facebook's proposal to show ads in WhatsApp and to let businesses analyze conversations with customers. Doing so would likely require the developers to break the end-to-end encryption that prevents WhatsApp and Facebook from reading user messages, according to Acton, which from his perspective would undermine the trust that allowed the messenger to become so popular.

Other problems ultimately led to Acton's departure from Facebook. He later joined the new Signal Foundation established to make sure the popular Signal messaging app, along with the Signal end-to-end encryption protocol used by WhatsApp and other tools, would continue operations. He also invested $50 million. Not long after, he sent the "#deletefacebook" tweet as the Cambridge Analytica scandal exploded.

Koum stuck it out longer than Acton so his stocks would fully vest. He departed Facebook in May, with The Washington Post reporting that he repeatedly clashed with Facebook's leadership, and other WhatsApp employees are said to be waiting for their stock to vest in November before departing the company as well. This in turn has raised fears that WhatsApp's default use of end-to-end encryption is endangered.

This all seems to be part of Facebook's approach to big acquisitions. Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger both left Facebook on September 25, ostensibly so they could "explore our curiosity and creativity again," BBC quoted Systrom as saying. But the publication cited sources who claimed that Instagram's ability to remain independent had declined over time. 

It might seem naive for Acton, Koum, Systrom and Krieger to have expected their companies to remain independent within Facebook. Acton himself seems not to blame Facebook.

“At the end of the day, I sold my company. I am a sellout. I acknowledge that," he told Forbes.

At least now he's using the money he made to sell out for good causes. He's reportedly pledged to spend $1 billion of his $3.6 billion to "support healthcare in impoverished areas of the U.S. as well as early childhood development," Forbes reported. And, of course, he's allowing Signal to grow.

Two-factor authentication is a must. People use weak passwords, companies fail to properly secure user information, and patient hackers can rely on sophisticated tools to crack many passwords if the proper countermeasures aren't in place. But it turns out Facebook also uses the system for ad targeting.

Northeastern University's Giridhari Venkatadri, Alan Mislove, and Piotr Sapiezynski published a paper in collaboration with Princeton University's Elena Lucherini revealing that Facebook gathers more information than many of its users think. That includes using the phone numbers people use to enable two-factor authentication, which means attempting to secure a Facebook account will actually expose more data to advertisers.

This data sharing isn't disclosed when people enable two-factor authentication on their Facebook accounts. Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill said that a spokesperson denied using this data when she asked if Facebook uses what she calls "shadow contact information" for ad targeting over a year ago. The company didn't merely hide this practice from its users; it also lied to a reporter who suspected everything wasn't on the up-and-up.

Facebook recently told Hill that people who don't want their phone number to be shared with advertisers should use app-based two-factor authentication. But that option was only added four months ago--before then people had to use their phone numbers to secure their accounts. Sharing those phone numbers with advertisers with neither warning nor consent effectively punished those who care most about their security.

That wasn't the only revelation from this paper. The researchers also revealed that Facebook lets advertisers use contact information for ad targeting even if the phone number, email, or what-have-you was collected from someone else's address book. There's no way for affected users to know their information was shared in this way.

There is a reasonable expectation that any information someone decides to share with Facebook will be given to advertisers. By now everyone should understand the company's business model, so filling out the "About" section on a profile or voluntarily sharing contact information obviously exposes that data to other companies. These revelations differ, however, in that Facebook is peddling data nobody voluntarily shared.

Entering a phone number to enable two-factor authentication isn't the same as sharing an address book with Facebook. And having contact information connected to an account simply because someone else who did share their address book has that data penalizes users with active social lives. Forcing people to decide between their privacy or their security and social lives isn't reasonable. It's flat-out bonkers.

The list of controversies around Facebook's data practices is longer than Kris Kringle's log of who's naughty and nice. Most notable was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which led to intense scrutiny from regulators around the world, but that was just the start of Facebook's recent troubles. Bugs mistakenly stored user information, glitches undermined privacy settings and the company's efforts to collect financial and medical information came to light. Now, a Pew report announced today shows that many Americans have been changing their relationship status with the social media platform over the last year.

Pew said that 54 percent of Americans have updated their privacy settings, 42 percent have taken extended breaks from Facebook and 26 percent have deleted the company's app from their phones in the last 12 months (the overlap stems from people who have done several of those things). Another nine percent downloaded the information Facebook has about them, and those people were even more likely to remove the app from their phones (47 percent) or update their privacy settings (79 percent) than those who didn't. All told, 74 percent of respondents told Pew they made at least one of these changes.

Young Facebook vs. Old Facebook

The survey also found a significant difference between how young Americans are using Facebook compared to their older counterparts. Pew said:

"Most notably, 44 percent of younger users (those ages 18 to 29) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past year, nearly four times the share of users ages 65 and older (12 percent) who have done so. Similarly, older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months: Only a third of Facebook users 65 and older have done this, compared with 64 percent of younger users."

That discrepancy could result from differing levels of technical literacy. However, Facebook has made efforts to simplify its settings and is prompting many of its users to at least check their privacy settings, if not actually update them. Still, there's a knowledge gap between people who have grown up with Facebook and those who haven't. More charitably, another possibility is that Facebook's older users already set up their privacy settings earlier and refused to use the mobile app.

Still, responses to Pew's poll should be greeted with skepticism. Pew polled 4,494 people between May and June 2018 about their Facebook use. The research group noted that "those who did not answer or gave other responses are not shown." Combine that with the fact that this is self-reported, and it's not hard to imagine the findings being skewed. Someone could have updated their privacy settings without realizing, said they took a break even if they really just checked Facebook less often, or lied about removing the app from their phone.

Facebook's own metrics have repeatedly shown that more people are using its platform than ever. But the Pew report isn't about people leaving the social network entirely. Instead, the report indicates that a significant number of people want to make sure their personal information is secure, while also trying not to be glued to Facebook. The social media site might be hard to quit entirely but changing user behavior could allow people to mitigate the effect it has on their lives.

Accounts linked to an Iranian "influence operation" are being removed from major social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter announced their efforts to prevent the operation from levering their platforms earlier this week, and now Google has done the same for several of its sites.

The number of accounts Google removed from YouTube, Blogger and Google+ pales in comparison to the number of accounts Facebook and Twitter removed. Google cut some 39 channels with "13,466 total U.S. views on relevant videos" from YouTube,  removed six blogs from Blogger and deleted 13 accounts on the Google+ social network. 

Facebook pulled 652 accounts from its platform and Instagram--though some were linked to Russia instead of Iran--and Twitter deleted 248. The disparity makes sense when you consider the amount of effort each platform requires: it's easier to share a link, image, or short message across multiple accounts than it is to produce videos or longer blog posts. And, well, fewer people use Google+ than either Facebook or Twitter.

Google and Facebook both collaborated with the FireEye security company on finding these malicious accounts. FireEye remained careful with its phrasing in the full report on this operation because it still isn't comfortable definitively attributing the efforts to Iran, but all three companies have said that all signs point to this being an Iranian operation that's supposed to sway Western political opinions in the country's favor.

Facebook said earlier this week that it found pages linked to "Liberty Front Press" that it connected "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."

Google said it drew connections between the accounts it removed from its platforms and the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). The company explained:

• Technical data associated with these actors is strongly linked to the official IRIB IP address space.
• Domain ownership information about these actors is strongly linked to IRIB account information.
• Account metadata and subscriber information associated with these actors is strongly linked to the corresponding information associated with the IRIB, indicating common ownership and control.

Google, like Facebook and FireEye, warned that Iran isn't the only country attempting to sway others via social media. Russia has been repeatedly accused of doing the same thing, and it's not crazy to think that other countries are likely conducting influence operations of their own. You know that comic about nobody on the internet knowing you're a dog? Well, now it seems more like nobody on the internet knows you're a fake account made for political gain.

Facebook announced in July that it had removed 32 accounts, pages, and groups from its social media platform and Instagram for attempting to influence the U.S. midterm elections. Apparently that wasn't enough to dissuade whoever is behind the efforts: the company announced on August 21 that the number of removed accounts rose to 652 after FireEye researchers discovered an "influence operation" on the platforms.

FireEye said the operation targeted people in the UK, Latin America, and the Middle East as well as the U.S. The company loosely attributed this operation to Iran--it assessed "with moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors"--and said it was used to "promote political narratives in line with Iranian interests." But attributing these operations is finicky, so FireEye was careful not to definitively blame Iran.

Facebook was more certain about the culprit, as was Twitter when it announced that it too had suspended 248 accounts for "engaging in coordinated manipulation." Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in an update to the July blog post:

"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. For example, one part of the network, 'Quest 4 Truth,' claims to be an independent Iranian media organization, but is in fact linked to Press TV, an English-language news network affiliated with Iranian state media."

Both companies said there doesn't appear to be a connection between Iran's operation and Russia's efforts to influence foreign politics via social media platforms. Instead, both countries have apparently decided that covertly manipulating foreign policies via tools like Facebook and Instagram is the best way to realize their political goals, and there's no telling how many other governments will end up duplicating these tactics.

But not finding a connection between this operation and Russia doesn't mean Facebook hasn't been busy with Putin & Co. Gleicher said:

"Finally, we’ve removed Pages, groups and accounts that can be linked to sources the US government has previously identified as Russian military intelligence services. This is unrelated to the activities we found in Iran. While these are some of the same bad actors we removed for cybersecurity attacks before the 2016 US election, this more recent activity focused on politics in Syria and Ukraine."

Facebook and FireEye made their revelations shortly after Microsoft announced that it had disrupted a Russia-linked hacking group's efforts to influence Republicans by spoofing the websites of popular think tanks and the U.S. Senate. Don't be surprised to hear more about these attempts to meddle with foreign politics between now and November--or in perpetuity. This is fast starting to seem like it's going to be the new "normal."

Reuters has reported that the U.S. federal government is trying to force Facebook to break the encryption of its Messenger app in a lawsuit that’s under seal. The government wants to be able to intercept Messenger voice calls in its investigations, but Facebook is reportedly contesting the government’s request.

Messenger Encryption Case

Last Tuesday, the judge in the Messenger case heard the government’s arguments to hold Facebook in contempt of court over the company’s refusal to break the Messenger app’s encryption. The government wishes to carry out a surveillance request in a case involving a criminal group of undocumented immigrants.

Facebook claimed in court that the Messenger app uses end-to-end encryption for all voice calls, which means the company itself can’t intercept those calls and neither can the government. The only way for Facebook and the government to intercept those conversations would be for Facebook to cripple or remove the end-to-end encryption between all users. Alternatively, either Facebook or the government would need to hack the users’ devices in order to obtain the conversations that are automatically decrypted locally by the application.

Both Facebook and the U.S. government have refused to comment on this case.

Government Fights for Legal Precedent

The government seems to be attempting to create a legal precedent for forcing companies to decrypt communications, no matter what type of encryption they use. The government tried to do the same to Apple in the San Bernardino case, but eventually withdrew from that case, saying it found an alternative method to break into the encrypted phone.

If the government wins this case, then it could force Facebook to decrypt not just Messenger voice communications, but also WhatsApp chats, which, at least for now, continue to use end-to-end encryption by default. Other companies using encryption will also be impacted, potentially even providers of open source private messengers such as Signal or Riot.

U.S. politicians such as North Carolina Senator Richard Burr and California Senator Dianne Feinstein have also attempted to pass legislation that would have allowed the government to compel companies to provide decrypted communications upon request. However, this bill was swiftly criticized by security experts, so it has been put on hold for now.

Facebook has identified coordinated attempts operating on its social media platform to influence the U.S. midterm elections this November, The New York Times reported today. Facebook wrote on its blog that 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram have been removed.

According to the Times, Facebook told lawmakers that it hasn't been able to conclusively tie the accounts to Russia, but that it still believes the country may be involved. The Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) was indeed involved in election interference during the 2016 presidential campaign. Facebook wrote that the newly discovered "bad actors" have used VPNs, internet phone services and third parties to run ads and create content, making them harder to track.

"We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts—including who may be behind this," Facebook's blog reads.

The coordination has been occuring on eight Facebook pages, 17 profiles and seven Instagram accounts, which Facebook wrote it first found two weeks ago. The pages were deeply rooted in divisive topics, like the #AbolishICE campaign to shut down the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a page called Resisters that had interacted with an IRA account and a page planning another Unite the Right white supremacist rally like the one that occurred in Charlottesville, Va. in August 2017.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, wrote that more than 290,000 accounts followed one or more of the pages. Those accounts made more than 9,500 posts on Facebook and one on Instagram. Additionally, the creators paid approximately $11,000 to run 150 ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook was bamboozled by the IRA's coordinated interference before, during and after the 2016 election and is now working with the FBI in an attempt to keep its platform from causing issues during the 2018 midterm elections.

Last week, President Donald J. Trump tweeted that he is "very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election [sic]," which was surprising as he had previously suggested Russia had not interfered in the election.

"We think it’s inevitable that we will find evidence and we will find other actors, whether these are from Russia, from other countries, or domestic actors that are looking to continue to try and abuse the platform,” Gleicher told the Times.

Earlier this month, a Microsoft security executive told the Aspen Security Forum that Microsoft had blocked attempts to hack into the campaigns of three congressional candidates running for seats in the 2018 midterm elections. 

You can read Facebook's series of blog posts about the investigation here.

Facebook has announced a rollout of mobile ads utilizing augmented reality. Soon, your feed will be filled with interactive experiences with the intent to sell you products.

On Tuesday, Facebook announced their new AR ad feature that will place virtually engaging advertisements in the News Feed. In its announcement to advertisers, Facebook claims that, “by incorporating calls-to-action within the camera experience, people can seamlessly go from engaging with your product—such as trying on a lipstick shade or exploring a new game—to making a purchase or installing an app.” Facebook’s marketing team seems to be attempting to make advertisers’ products as tangible as possible.

Michael Kors will be the first to test Facebook’s new AR advertisements, allowing customers to ‘try on’ their sunglasses through an augmented selfie. The new service is reminiscent of advertised Snapchat filters, and Facebook will also redirect users to product pages after a Clueless-closet-type virtual styling. The hope is that using AR in marketing will make consumers engage in ads, rather than just scroll by them.

This new ad experience is intended to lure in holiday shoppers, who do more and more gift-giving through online shops. In the lead up to peak holiday rush, more ads will start showing up for testing. Expect to see brands including Sephora, NYX Professional Makeup, Bobbi Brown, Pottery Barn and Wayfair in your augmented News Feed this summer.