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DC is starting to revamp their space a little by announcing some dope stuff coming to the company. They’ve announced their DC Universe streaming service. It serves as a curated platform for DCs […]
The post DCEU NEWS: First Look At Titan’s Robin, More ‘The Batman’ Rumors and More appeared first on Geek.com.
Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, who has served on Snap’s board of directors since December 2012, is not expected to stand for re-election to Snap’s board of directors and will thus be stepping down, according to a report by The Information.
Early investors stepping down from the board of directors — or at least not seeking re-election — isn’t that uncommon as once-private companies grow into larger public ones. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton did not seek re-election for Twitter’s board of directors in April last year. As Snap continues to navigate its future, especially as it has declined precipitously since going public and now sits at a valuation of around $16.5 billion. Partners with an expertise in the early-stage and later-stage startup life cycle may end up seeing themselves more useful taking a back seat and focusing on other investments. The voting process for board member re-election happens during the company’s annual meeting, so we’ll get more information when an additional proxy filing comes out ahead of the meeting later this year.
Benchmark is, or at least was at the time of going public last year, one of Snap’s biggest shareholders. According to the company’s 424B filing prior to going public in March last year, Benchmark held ownership of 23.1% of Snap’s Class B common stock and 8.2% of Snap’s Class A common stock. Lasky has been with Benchmark since April 2007, and also serves on the boards of a number of gaming companies like Riot Games and thatgamecompany, the creators of PlayStation titles flower and Journey. At the time, Snap said in its filing that Lasky was “qualified to serve as a member of our board of directors due to his extensive experience with social media and technology companies, as well as his experience as a venture capitalist investing in technology companies.”
The timing could be totally coincidental, but an earlier Recode report suggested Lasky had been talking about stepping down in future funds for Benchmark. The firm only recently wrapped up a very public battle with Uber, which ended up with Benchmark selling a significant stake in the company and a new CEO coming in to replace co-founder Travis Kalanick. Benchmark hired its first female general partner, Sarah Tavel, earlier this year.
We’ve reached out to both Snap and a representative from Benchmark for comment and will update the story when we hear back.
Forget Peak TV. We’re living in an age of Peak Content, period. There are so many cool shows and movies and games and weird internet videos you could consume at any given moment […]
The post Power, Politics and Gorgeous Wrestling: Let Geek Tell You What to Watch This Weekend appeared first on Geek.com.
We’re a long way from getting functional displays that float in the middle of your desk thanks to holograms, or borderless, transparent LCDs, or other currently unwieldy technology. It might look cool in […]
The post GEEK PICK: Star Trek Schematic Illuminated Display appeared first on Geek.com.
Want to get your Batman fix while you’re driving? Well, DC Comics and GraphicAudio have joined forces with Humble Bundle to offer a ton of dramatized superhero audiobooks on the cheap. Snag up […]
The post Geek Deals: $440 Worth of Digital DC Comics Audiobooks for $15 at Humble Bundle appeared first on Geek.com.
I think a subtle but vital part of the robots’ planned takeover Earth is getting us all extremely comfortable with interacting with digital assistants. Virtual helpers like Siri and Alexa are becoming increasingly […]
The post CIMON AI Astronaut Assistance is Siri for Space Stations appeared first on Geek.com.
At the start, Tandy and Tyrone are investigating their own cases individually. Tandy is pouring over Greg’s files on Roxxon, which includes a staple of every evil corporation: A military-worshiping PR video about […]
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This week, Tinder responded to a letter from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden calling for the company to seal up security loopholes in its app that could lead to blackmail and other privacy incursions.
In a letter to Sen. Wyden, Match Group General Counsel Jared Sine describes recent changes to the app, noting that as of June 19, “swipe data has been padded such that all actions are now the same size.” Sine added that images on the mobile app are fully encrypted as of February 6, while images on the web version of Tinder were already encrypted.
The Tinder issues were first called out in a report by a research team at Checkmarx describing the app’s “disturbing vulnerabilities” and their propensity for blackmail:
“The vulnerabilities, found in both the app’s Android and iOS versions, allow an attacker using the same network as the user to monitor the user’s every move on the app. It is also possible for an attacker to take control over the profile pictures the user sees, swapping them for inappropriate content, rogue advertising or other type of malicious content (as demonstrated in the research).
“While no credential theft and no immediate financial impact are involved in this process, an attacker targeting a vulnerable user can blackmail the victim, threatening to expose highly private information from the user’s Tinder profile and actions in the app.”
In February, Wyden called for Tinder to address the vulnerability by encrypting all data that moves between its servers and the app and by padding data to obscure it from hackers. In a statement to TechCrunch at the time, Tinder indicated that it heard Sen. Wyden’s concerns and had recently implemented encryption for profile photos in the interest of moving toward deepening its privacy practices.
“Like every technology company, we are constantly working to improve our defenses in the battle against malicious hackers and cyber criminals” Sine said in the letter. “… Our goal is to have protocols and systems that not only meet, but exceed industry best practices.”
The Milky Way is clogged with grease—and not the kind you’d want to spread on toast. Astronomers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney and Ege University in Turkey used […]
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Twitter has a new product manager in the wake of a large re-org of the company announced this week. The changes will see Twitter dividing its business into groups including engineering, product, revenue product, design and research, and more, while also bringing on Kayvon Beykpour, the GM of video and former Periscope CEO, as product head.
Beykpour will replace Ed Ho, vice president of product and engineering, as Ho steps down into a part-time role. In a series of tweets, Ho explains his decision was based on a family loss, and says he hopes to return full-time in the future. He had been on leave from Twitter since May.
As Recode noted, these change will make Beykpour the sixth exec to head up product since early 2014.
Meanwhile, Ho’s other role — head of engineering — will now be overseen by Mike Montano, who is stepping up from product engineering.
Twitter CEO’s announcement of the changes, below, was tweeted out on Thursday:
Earlier this week we reported that ThinkGeek would be making the NES Classic Edition available today (in limited quantities). It should come as no surprise the highly sought-after miniature console is once again […]
The post 8Bitdo Launches a New Wireless Controller for the NES Classic Edition appeared first on Geek.com.
The first Overcooked launched almost two years ago on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC where critics praised it for its co-operative cooking chaos. But unsurprisingly love for the game exploded when it arrived […]
The post Hands-On: Overcooked 2 is Very Spicy appeared first on Geek.com.
Luke Cage’s second season made me excited about the Netflix corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe again. Not that it’s been all that bad lately. Defenders was a tight, fun story with a great villain. […]
The post Luke Cage Learns from its Past, Even When its Characters Don’t appeared first on Geek.com.
Body odor is to ring-tailed lemurs as blood is to sharks: The Madagascan primates can identify weaker rivals with just a sniff. Sense of smell is hugely important to lemurs, which rely heavily […]
The post Lemurs Can Smell Weakness in Injured Compatriots appeared first on Geek.com.
Missed this week’s Full Strawberry Moon? The Internet’s got your back. Social media is brimming with photographic evidence of the colorful celestial event. Appearing “opposite” the Sun (in Earth-based longitude), the celestial body […]
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Robots are quickly replacing taxi drivers, couriers, sex workers, caretakers, and cleaners. But I’d have thought stunt doubles were safe from locum tenens. Of course, anything is possible at Disney. The Walt Disney […]
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Have you ever thought to yourself, “I sure do love reading Geek.com’s thoughts on the latest video games but is there a way I could watch them play the latest video games?” Well […]
The post Geek Plays: Mario Tennis Aces appeared first on Geek.com.
The windshield on your car, truck, van, or SUV does way more than keep bugs out of your face and provide take-out joints a place to stick their menus. It’s also a critical […]
The post Acura SUV Drives Itself Into Oncoming Traffic After Windshield Replacement appeared first on Geek.com.
Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology discovered why it is impossible to increase the speed limit of light. (Which, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, is set at 186,000 miles per second.) […]
The post Synthetic Optical Materials Ideal for Flexible Devices appeared first on Geek.com.
Twitter is unveiling the Ads Transparency Center that it announced back in October.
This comes as Twitter and other online platforms have faced growing political scrutiny around the role they may have played in spreading misinformation, particularly in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
For example, House Democrats recently released thousands of of Russian-funded political Facebook ads, and Facebook will reportedly release its own ad transparency tool this week. (In fact, as this story publishes, I’m at a Facebook press event focused on ad transparency.)
Twitter says that with this tool, you should be able to search for any Twitter handle and bring up all the ad campaigns from that account that have run for the past seven days. For political advertisers in the U.S., there will be additional data, including information around billing, ad spend, impressions per tweet and demographic targeting.
Everyone should be able to access the Ads Transparency Center, no login required.
As part of the political ad guidelines that Twitter announced last month, the company says it will be visually identifying ads that are tied to federal elections in the United States. Over time, it plans to develop a policy specifically around “issue ads” (i.e., political ads that aren’t explicitly promoting a candidate) and looking for ways to expand these policies internationally.
“We are doing our due diligence to get this right and will have more updates to come,” writes Twitter’s Bruce Falck in a blog post. “We stay committed to iterating and improving our work in this space, and doing what’s right for our community.”
LinkedIn — the social network with more than 560 million members who connect around work-related topics and job-seeking — continues to add more features, integrating technology from its new owner Microsoft, both to improve engagement on LinkedIn as well as to create deeper data ties between the two businesses.
Today, the company announced two more: users can now instantly view translations of content on the site when it appears in a language that is not the one set as a default; and they can now use QR codes to quickly swap contact details with other LinkedIn members.
In both cases, the features are likely overdue. The lingua franca of LinkedIn seems to be English, but the platform has a large global reach, and as it continues to try to expand to a wider range of later adopters and different categories of users, having a translation feature seems to be a no-brainer. It would also put it in closer line with the likes of Twitter and Facebook, which have had translation options for years.
The QR code generator, meanwhile, has become a key way for people to swap their details when they are not already connected on a network. And with LinkedIn this makes a lot of sense: there are so many people with the same name and it can be a challenge figuring out which “Mark Smith” you might want to connect with after coming across him at an event. And given that LinkedIn has been looking for more ways of making its app useful in in-person situations, this is an obvious way to enable that.
Translations are coming by way of the Microsoft Text Analytics API, the same Azure Cognitive Service that powers translations on Bing, Skype and Office (as well as third-party services like Twitter). It will be available in more than 60 languages, with more coming soon, LinkedIn says, to a “majority” of members using either the desktop or mobile web versions of LinkedIn.
The company says that it will be coming to LinkedIn’s iOS and Android apps in due course, as well. Users will get the “see translation” link based on a number of signals you’re providing to LinkedIn that include your language setting on the platform, the country where you are accessing content and the language you have used in your profile.
Content covered by the option to translate will include the main feed, the activity section on a person’s profile and posts if you click on them in the feed or share it.
Meanwhile, with QR codes, you trigger the ability to capture one by clicking in the search box on the iOS or Android app. Through that window, you can also pick up your own code to share with others.
LinkedIn suggests that the QR code can effectively become the replacement for the business card for people when they are at in-person events. But another option is that you can use this now in any place where you might want to provide a shortcut to your profile.
A simple nip and tuck of the genetic code could erase autism for good, according to a new study. Using gene-editing tool CRISPR, scientists were able to eliminate traits associated with the developmental […]
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The post AdamTots Presents: You Are What You Eat appeared first on Geek.com.
You probably already have a pretty accurate idea of what Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is, and not just because Nintendo spent nearly half an hour detailing the upcoming mascot fighter at E3 recently. The […]
The post Hands-On: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Goes Pro appeared first on Geek.com.
SD cards have come a long way since the original standard was unveiled nearly two decades ago. Today’s cards are much faster and can hold a lot more data. They’ll also look like […]
The post Next-gen SD Cards Will Be Blazing Fast And Hold Up To 128TB appeared first on Geek.com.
Data from NASA’s retired Cassini spacecraft revealed evidence of complex organic molecules spewing from the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The 20-year mission previously uncovered more than 100 geysers near the south […]
The post Is There Life on One of Saturn’s Moons? appeared first on Geek.com.
There’s been a lot of confusion over just what Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee even are, confusion that’ll likely continue until the game’s release this November. These are the first Pokemon RPGs on Nintendo Switch, […]
The post Hands-On: Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee is a Missing Link appeared first on Geek.com.
Facebook knows the historical app audit it’s conducting in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal is going to result in a tsunami of skeletons tumbling out of its closet.
It’s already suspended around 200 apps as a result of the audit — which remains ongoing, with no formal timeline announced for when the process (and any associated investigations that flow from it) will be concluded.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the audit on March 21, writing then that the company would “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity”.
But you do have to question how much the audit exercise is, first and foremost, intended to function as PR damage limitation for Facebook’s brand — given the company’s relaxed response to a data abuse report concerning a quiz app with ~120M monthly users, which it received right in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Because despite Facebook being alerted about the risk posed by the leaky quiz apps in late April — via its own data abuse bug bounty program — they were still live on its platform a month later.
It took about a further month for the vulnerability to be fixed.
And, sure, Facebook was certainly busy over that period. Busy dealing with a major privacy scandal.
Perhaps the company was putting rather more effort into pumping out a steady stream of crisis PR — including taking out full page newspaper adverts (where it wrote that: “we have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it”) — vs actually ‘locking down the platform’, per its repeat claims, even though the company’s long and rich privacy-hostile history suggests otherwise.
Let’s also not forget that, in early April, Facebook quietly confessed to a major security flaw of its own — when it admitted that an account search and recovery feature had been abused by “malicious actors” who, over what must have been a period of several years, had been able to surreptitiously collect personal data on a majority of Facebook’s ~2BN users — and use that intel for whatever they fancied.
So Facebook users already have plenty reasons to doubt the company’s claims to be able to “protect your information”. But this latest data fail facepalm suggests it’s hardly scrambling to make amends for its own stinkingly bad legacy either.
Change will require regulation. And in Europe that has arrived, in the form of the GDPR.
Although it remains to be seen whether Facebook will face any data breach complaints in this specific instance, i.e. for not disclosing to affected users that their information was at risk of being exposed by the leaky quiz apps.
The regulation came into force on May 25 — and the javascript vulnerability was not fixed until June. So there may be grounds for concerned consumers to complain.
Writing in a Medium post, the security researcher who filed the report — self-styled “hacker” Inti De Ceukelaire — explains he went hunting for data abusers on Facebook’s platform after the company announced a data abuse bounty on April 10, as the company scrambled to present a responsible face to the world following revelations that a quiz app running on its platform had surreptitiously harvested millions of users’ data — data that had been passed to a controversial UK firm which intended to use it to target political ads at US voters.
De Ceukelaire says he began his search by noting down what third party apps his Facebook friends were using — finding quizzes were one of the most popular apps. Plus he already knew quizzes had a reputation for being data-suckers in a distracting wrapper. So he took his first ever Facebook quiz, from a brand called NameTests.com, and quickly realized the company was exposing Facebook users’ data to “any third-party that requested it”.
The issue was that NameTests was displaying the quiz taker’s personal data (such as full name, location, age, birthday) in a javascript file — thereby potentially exposing the identify and other data on logged in Facebook users to any external website they happened to visit.
He also found it was providing an access token that allowed it to grant even more expansive data access permissions to third party websites — such as to users’ Facebook posts, photos and friends.
It’s not clear exactly why — but presumably relates to the quiz app company’s own ad targeting activities. (Its privacy policy states: “We work together with various technological partners who, for example, display advertisements on the basis of user data. We make sure that the user’s data is pseudonymised (e.g. no clear data such as names or e-mail addresses) and that users have simple rights of revocation at their disposal. We also conclude special data protection agreements with our partners, in which they commit themselves to the protection of user data.” — which sounds great until you realize its javascript was just leaking people’s personally identified data… [facepalm])
“Depending on what quizzes you took, the javascript could leak your facebook ID, first name, last name, language, gender, date of birth, profile picture, cover photo, currency, devices you use, when your information was last updated, your posts and statuses, your photos and your friends,” writes De Ceukelaire.
He reckons people’s data had been being publicly exposed since at least the end of 2016.
On Facebook, NameTests describes its purpose thusly: “Our goal is simple: To make people smile!” — adding that its quizzes are intended as a bit of “fun”.
It doesn’t shout so loudly that the ‘price’ for taking one of its quizzes, say to find out what Disney princess you ‘are’, or what you could look like as an oil painting, is not only that it will suck out masses of your personal data (and potentially your friends’ data) from Facebook’s platform for its own ad targeting purposes but was also, until recently, that your and other people’s information could have been exposed to goodness knows who, for goodness knows what nefarious purposes…
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal has underlined that ostensibly frivolous social data can end up being repurposed for all sorts of manipulative and power-grabbing purposes. (And not only can end up, but that quizzes are deliberately built to be data-harvesting tools… So think of that the next time you get a ‘take this quiz’ notification asking ‘what is in your fact file?’ or ‘what has your date of birth imprinted on you’? And hope ads is all you’re being targeted for… )
De Ceukelaire found that NameTests would still reveal Facebook users’ identity even after its app was deleted.
“In order to prevent this from happening, the user would have had to manually delete the cookies on their device, since NameTests.com does not offer a log out functionality,” he writes.
“I would imagine you wouldn’t want any website to know who you are, let alone steal your information or photos. Abusing this flaw, advertisers could have targeted (political) ads based on your Facebook posts and friends. More explicit websites could have abused this flaw to blackmail their visitors, threatening to leak your sneaky search history to your friends,” he adds, fleshing out the risks for affected Facebook users.
As well as alerting Facebook to the vulnerability, De Ceukelaire says he contacted NameTests — and they claimed to have found no evidence of abuse by a third party. They also said they would make changes to fix the issue.
We’ve reached out to NameTests’ parent company — a German firm called Social Sweethearts — for comment. Its website touts a “data-driven approach” — and claims its portfolio of products achieve “a global organic reach of several billion page views per month”.
After De Ceukelaire reported the problem to Facebook, he says he received an initial response from the company on April 30 saying they were looking into it. Then, hearing nothing for some weeks, he sent a follow up email, on May 14, asking whether they had contacted the app developers.
A week later Facebook replied saying it could take three to six months to investigate the issue (i.e. the same timeframe mentioned in their initial automated reply), adding they would keep him in the loop.
Yet at that time — which was a month after his original report — the leaky NameTests quizzes were still up and running, meaning Facebook users’ data was still being exposed and at risk. And Facebook knew about the risk.
The next development came on June 25, when De Ceukelaire says he noticed NameTests had changed the way they process data to close down the access they had been exposing to third parties.
Two days later Facebook also confirmed the flaw in writing, admitting: “[T]his could have allowed an attacker to determine the details of a logged-in user to Facebook’s platform.”
It also told him it had confirmed with NameTests the issue had been fixed. And its apps continue to be available on Facebook’s platform — suggesting Facebook did not find the kind of suspicious activity that has led it to suspend other third party apps. (At least, assuming it conducted an investigation.)
Facebook paid out a $4,000 x2 bounty to a charity under the terms of its data abuse bug bounty program — and per De Ceukelaire’s request.
We asked it what took it so long to respond to the data abuse report, especially given the issue was so topical when De Ceukelaire filed the report. But Facebook declined to answer specific questions.
Instead it sent us the following statement, attributed to Ime Archibong, its VP of product partnerships:
A researcher brought the issue with the nametests.com website to our attention through our Data Abuse Bounty Program that we launched in April to encourage reports involving Facebook data. We worked with nametests.com to resolve the vulnerability on their website, which was completed in June.
Facebook also claims it received De Ceukelaire’s report on April 27, rather than April 22, as he recounts it. Though it’s possible the former date is when Facebook’s own staff retrieved the report from its systems.
Beyond displaying a disturbingly relaxed attitude to other people’s privacy — which risks getting Facebook into regulatory trouble, given GDPR’s strict requirements around breach disclosure, for example — the other core issue of concern here is the company’s apparent failure to enforce its own developer policy.
The underlying issue is whether or not Facebook performs any checks on apps running on its platform. It’s no good having T&Cs if you don’t have any active processes to enforce your T&Cs. Rules without enforcement aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Historical evidence suggests Facebook did not actively enforce its developer T&Cs — even if it’s now “locking down the platform”, as it claims, as a result of so many privacy scandals.
The quiz app developer at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Aleksandr Kogan — who harvested and sold/passed Facebook user data to third parties — has accused Facebook of essentially not having a policy. He contends it is therefore Facebook who is responsible for the massive data abuses that have played out on its platform — only a portion of which have so far come to light.
Fresh examples such as NameTests’ leaky quiz apps merely bolster the case Kogan made for Facebook being the guilty party where data misuse is concerned. After all, if you built some stables without any doors at all would you really blame your horses for bolting?
Synthetic DNA could be the answer to lighter, thinner electronic displays. Researchers at Northwestern University developed new design principles for making photonic crystals like the ones typically used in computer, television, and smartphone […]
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Some of the best things are coming out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The fantastic characters, interlocking storylines, and the upcoming array of female superheroes that are slaying alongside our favorite male ones. […]
The post MCU NEWS: More Female Superheroes, Johansson Confirmed for Black Widow Film and More appeared first on Geek.com.
Instagram’s future growth depends on the developing world, so it’s built a version of its app just for them. “Instagram Lite” for Android appeared today in the Google Play App Store without any announcement from the company. “The Instagram Lite app is small, allowing you to save space on your phone and download it quickly” the description reads.
At just 573 kilobytes, Instagram Lite is 1/55th the size of Instagram’s 32 megabyte main app. It lets you filter and post photos to the feed or Stories, watch Stories, and browse the Explore page, but currently lacks the options to share videos or Direct message friends.
Instagram Lite addresses many problems common amongst mobile users in the developing world who are often on older phones with less storage space, slower network connections, or who can’t afford big data packages. Users might not have to delete photos or other apps to install Instagram Lite, or wait a long time and pay more for it to download.
Screenshots of Instagram Lite
The release follows Instagram’s revamped mobile website that launched last month, also designed for the developing world. At the time I wrote, “The launch begs the question of whether Instagram will release an Instagram Lite version of its native app.” The answer is yes. Mobile analytics service Sensor Tower tipped TechCrunch off to the release.
When asked for comment, an Instagram spokesperson confirmed that Instagram Lite began testing in Mexico this week, and provided this statement: “We are testing a new version of Instagram for Android that takes up less space on your device, uses less data, and starts faster.” The company wouldn’t say whether ads would be included. Later this year the app will expand to more countries, and get messaging and video posting capabilities.
The “Lite” trend has picked up steam recently. Facebook launched Facebook Lite in 2015, and it had 200 million users by 2017. That paved the way for the launch of Messenger Lite in April 2018, and Uber glommed on to the strategy with the release of its own Lite app earlier this month. Users have clearly been craving Instagram Lite, since a fake/unofficial Facebook Page with that has racked up over 2000 Likes.
Instagram announced last week at the IGTV unveiling that it had hit 1 billion monthly active users. It’s been growing at roughly 100 million users every four months, with much of that coming from the developing world. Snapchat neglected international markets to focus on US teens, leaving the door open for Instagram and WhatsApp’s clones of Snapchat Stories to grab big user bases in countries like India and Brazil.
With this new growth tool in its belt, Instagram may see even swifter adoption in emerging markets. It could score potentially score evenue straight from Lite if ads are included, then as phones and networks improve, hope to shift users onto the full-fidelity version. Now, eyes will be on Snapchat to see if it builds its own Lite app. Otherwise it risks continuing to slip further behind the Instagram juggernaut.
More scrutiny than ever is in place on the tech industry, and while high-profile cases like Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of lawmakers garner headlines, there are subtler forces at work. This study from a Norway watchdog group eloquently and painstakingly describes the ways that companies like Facebook and Google push their users towards making choices that negatively affect their own privacy.
It was spurred, like many other new inquiries, by Europe’s GDPR, which has caused no small amount of consternation among companies for whom collecting and leveraging user data is their main source of income.
The report (PDF) goes into detail on exactly how these companies create an illusion of control over your data while simultaneously nudging you towards making choices that limit that control.
Although the companies and their products will be quick to point out that they are in compliance with the requirements of the GDPR, there are still plenty of ways in which they can be consumer-unfriendly.
In going through a set of privacy popups put out in May by Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the researchers found that the first two especially feature “dark patterns, techniques and features of interface design mean to manipulate users…used to nudge users towards privacy intrusive options.”
Flowchart illustrating the Facebook privacy options process – the green boxes are the “easy” route.
It’s not big obvious things — in fact, that’s the point of these “dark patterns”: that they are small and subtle yet effective ways of guiding people towards the outcome preferred by the designers.
For instance, in Facebook and Google’s privacy settings process, the more private options are simply disabled by default, and users not paying close attention will not know that there was a choice to begin with. You’re always opting out of things, not in. To enable these options is also a considerably longer process: 13 clicks or taps versus 4 in Facebook’s case.
That’s especially troubling when the companies are also forcing this action to take place at a time of their choosing, not yours. And Facebook added a cherry on top, almost literally, with the fake red dots that appeared behind the privacy popup, suggesting users had messages and notifications waiting for them even if that wasn’t the case.
When choosing the privacy-enhancing option, such as disabling face recognition, users are presented with a tailored set of consequences: “we won’t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo to impersonate you,” for instance, to scare the user into enabling it. But nothing is said about what you will be opting into, such as how your likeness could be used in ad targeting or automatically matched to photos taken by others.
Disabling ad targeting on Google, meanwhile, warns you that you will not be able to mute some ads going forward. People who don’t understand the mechanism of muting being referred to here will be scared of the possibility — what if an ad pops up at work or during a show and I can’t mute it? So they agree to share their data.
Before you make a choice, you have to hear Facebook’s case.
In this way users are punished for choosing privacy over sharing, and are always presented only with a carefully curated set of pros and cons intended to cue the user to decide in favor of sharing. “You’re in control,” the user is constantly told, though those controls are deliberately designed to undermine what control you do have and exert.
Microsoft, while guilty of the biased phrasing, received much better marks in the report. Its privacy setup process put the less and more private options right next to each other, presenting them as equally valid choices rather than some tedious configuration tool that might break something if you’re not careful. Subtle cues do push users towards sharing more data or enabling voice recognition, but users aren’t punished or deceived the way they are elsewhere.
You may already have been aware of some of these tactics, as I was, but it makes for interesting reading nevertheless. We tend to discount these things when it’s just one screen here or there, but seeing them all together along with a calm explanation of why they are the way they are makes it rather obvious that there’s something insidious at play here.
Ready to scrounge for Likes on your Stories too? Facebook Stories can feel like a ghost town even though it has 150 million daily users. So Facebook is trying to get more people who view your ephemeral content on its Snapchat clone to speak up so you keep posting. Today Facebook is bringing its Like, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry and Love “Reactions” from News Feed to Stories, replacing the generic emoji quick replies it previously offered. It’s also adding two “interactive stickers” — a flame and a laughing smile — you can add to your own Stories that when tapped by a friend, shimmer and notify you.
To the same effect, Facebook is letting people start a group reply to your Story with multiple friends that launches a group thread on Messenger. And when you tap to see who’s viewed your Facebook Story, the viewer list will highlight people who sent reactions or Messenger replies.
Combined, these four new ways to give feedback on Stories should make it feel less like you’re posting into a black hole. Facebook has found great success with its Like button and other Reactions for News Feed posts and Instagram’s Heart button. They both trigger a dopamine hit of self-satisfaction that encourages you to continue sharing that’s more visceral than just knowing someone watched your Story.
I wonder if a Like button will come to Instagram Stories, especially after former Facebook VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri was recently named VP of product for Instagram.
Oh, and just in case Stories wasn’t turning into a vanity contest already, according to Mari Smith via Matt Navarra, Facebook is now testing a Selfie mode in the Stories camera with a Soft Focus option similar to the recent Instagram Focus launch.
When Snapchat invented the Stories format, it purposefully left out a Like button because it would make sharing into a competition where users craved the binary feedback and posted whatever was most popular.
In fact, when I interviewed Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom in 2016 around the launch of Instagram Stories he told me, “We definitely asked ourselves what if we removed Likes from Instagram? What would happen? … If you have Likes … you get certain behaviors, and the behavior we wanted was for you to be able to share as much as you wanted. And the lack of Likes in this space lets you let down your guard.”
Now Facebook is changing that fundamental principle of Stories, which could give us a whole new quantified measure of our worth to turn into an addiction and coerce us to share not what’s authentic but what’s Likeable.
As technology gets smaller, our dreams get bigger: Two space tech companies created next-generation thrusters, ideal for interplanetary travel. Electric propulsion—specifically ion thruster engines—have helped launch spacecraft for decades. For instance, the popular […]
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Is Ant-Man and The Wasp good? Yes. Is it better than the original? No. By how much? Not too much. It’s mostly different – some people will probably like this one better, I’d […]
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“A handful of people’s favorite X-Man – Jamie Madrox – was alive for a while. Then he was dead. Now he’s not. But he will be again if he doesn’t kill himself trying […]
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Amazon Prime Day 2018 is scheduled for Tuesday, July 17, with deals starting midday on the 16th. But shh, you’re not supposed to know yet! It appears the e-retail giant’s UK website accidentally […]
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Forget Robot Chicken, Venture Bros., and, yes, even Rick & Morty. In our opinion the secret best ongoing Adult Swim series is Infomercials, comedy horror short films that air without context at 4 […]
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Don’t want to know the ending to a World Cup game or Avengers movie until you’ve watched it, or just need to quiet an exhausting political topic like “Trump”? Facebook is now testing the option to “snooze” specific keywords so you won’t see them for 30 days in News Feed or Groups. The feature is rolling out to a small percentage of users today. It could make people both more comfortable browsing the social network when they’re trying to avoid something, and not feel guilty posting about sensitive topics.
The feature was first spotted in the Facebook’s app’s code by Chris Messina on Sunday, who told TechCrunch he found a string for “snooze keywords for 30 days”. We reached out to Facebook on Monday, which didn’t initially respond, but last night provided details we could publish at 5am this morning ahead of an official announcement later today. The test follows the roll out of snoozing people, Pages, and Groups from last December.
To snooze a keyword, you first have to find a post that includes it. That kind of defeats the whole purpose since you might run into the spoiler you didn’t want to see. But when asked about that problem, a Facebook spokesperson told me the company is looking into adding a preemptive snooze option in the next few weeks, potentially in News Feed Preferences. It’s also considering a recurring snooze list so you could easily re-enable hiding your favorite sports team before any game you’ll have to watch on delay.
For now, though, when you see the word you can hit the drop-down arrow on the post which will reveal an option to “snooze keywords in this post”. Tapping that reveals a list of nouns from the post you might want to nix, without common words like “the” in the way. So if you used the feature on a post that said “England won its World Cup game against Tunisia! Yes!”, the feature would pull out “World Cup”, “England”, and “Tunisia”. Select all that you want to snooze, and posts containing them will be hidden for a month. Currently, the feature only works on text, not images, and won’t suggest synonyms you might want to snooze as well.
The spokesperson says the feature “was something that kept coming up” in Facebook interviews with users. The option applies to any organic content, but you can’t block ads with it, so if you snoozed “Deadpool” you wouldn’t see posts from friends about the movie but still might see ads to buy tickets. Facebook’s excuse for this is that ads belong to a “a separate team, separate algorithm” but surely it just doesn’t want to open itself up to users mass-blocking its revenue driver. The spokesperson also said that snoozing isn’t currently being used for other content and ad targeting purposes.
We asked why users can’t permanently mute keywords like Twitter launched in November 2016, or the way Instagram launched keyword blocking for your posts’ comments in September 2016. Facebook says “If we’re hearing from people that they want more or less time” that might get added as the feature rolls out beyond a test. There is some sense to defaulting to only temporary muting, as users might simply forget they blocked their favorite sports team before a big game, and then wouldn’t see it mentioned forever after.
But when it comes to abuse, permanent muting is something Facebook really should offer. Instead it’s relied on users flagging abuse like racial slurs, and it recently revealed its content moderation guidelines. Some topics that are fine for others could be tough for certain people to see, though, and helping users prevent trauma probably deserves to be prioritized above stopping reality TV spoilers.
Social SafeGuard, a 2014-founded U.S. startup which sells security services to enterprises aimed at mitigating a range of digital risks that lie outside the corporate firewall, has closed an $11 million Series B funding round, from AllegisCyber and NightDragon Security.
It’s hoping to ride the surge in awareness around social media fakery — putting the new funding towards sales and marketing, plus some product dev.
“As one of the few dedicated cybersecurity venture firms, we know how big this challenge has become for today’s security executives,” said Spencer Tall, MD of AllegisCyber, in a supporting statement. Tall is joining the Social SafeGuard board.
“This is no longer a fringe need that can be ignored or deferred. Digital risk protection should be on the shortlist of corporate security priorities for the next decade,” he adds.
Social SafeGuard’s SaaS platform is designed to alert customers to risks that might cause damage to a business or brand’s reputation — such as brand impersonation, compliance issues or even the spread of fake news — as well as more pure-play security threats, such as social phishing, malware, spam and fake accounts.
Its platform uses machine learning and a customized policy engine to offer real-time monitoring of 50 digital and social channels (integrating via an API hub) — including social media platforms, mobile messaging apps, IM tools like Slack, unified comms platforms (Skype for business etc), clouds apps like Office365, blogs and news sites, and the dark web.
The types of threats the platform is trained to look out for include malicious message content, inappropriate images, malicious links, account takeover attempts and brand impersonation.
“Digital risks to any enterprise are twofold: internal or external — from employees communicating in non-compliant ways that expose a business to regulatory danger to more typical cyber threats like phishing, malware, account hacks or brand impersonation. Social SafeGuard helps mitigate all of these new digital risks by giving companies the tools to detect threats and defend against them, so they can adopt new technologies without fear,” says founder and CEO Jim Zuffoletti.
As well as threat detection and real-time notification, the platform includes built in take-down requests and follow-through — “to make threat management as responsive as possible”, as he puts it.
Social SafeGuard’s software also does risk scoring to aid the rapid triage of potential threats, and uses AI to try to anticipate “potential attacks and identify known bad actors” — so it’s responding to a wider security industry shift from purely defensive, reactive actions towards pro-active detection and response.
On the compliance front, the platform includes a governance and customizable policy engine that enterprises can use to monitor employee and partner communications for regulatory violations.
“For compliance-focused clients, messages are archived with automated audit trails that provide transparency and clarity,” notes Zuffoletti.
The platform has around 50 customers at this stage. Zuffoletti says its biggest customers are in the financial services and life sciences sectors — but says high tech is its fastest-growing sector.
Examples of the kinds of attacks its tools have been used to prevent include account takeovers, malware attacks, financial regulations violations, and FCPA and HIPAA violations.
“In one recent example, we were able to perform a forensic analysis of an online securities fraud scheme, which also posed brand reputation issues for one of our clients,” he adds. “Our platform is adaptable to evolving hybrid threats, too.”
On the competitive front, Zuffoletti namechecks the likes of Proofpoint and RiskIQ.
I got a phone call last week inquiring about a car accident I’d been in. Don’t worry—it was a wrong number. But I almost stayed on the line just to chat with the […]
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Twitter has announced a range of actions intended to bolster efforts to fight spam and “malicious automation” (aka bad bots) on its platform — including increased security measures around account verification and sign-up; running a historical audit to catch spammers who signed up when its systems were more lax; and taking a more proactive approach to identifying spam activity to reduce its ability to make an impact.
It says the new steps build on previously announced measures to fight abuse and trolls, and new policies on hateful conduct and violent extremism.
The company has also recently been publicly seeking new technology and staff to fight spam and abuse.
All of which is attempting to turn around Twitter’s reputation for being awful at tackling abuse.
“Our focus is increasingly on proactively identifying problematic accounts and behavior rather than waiting until we receive a report,” Twitter’s Yoel Roth and Del Harvey write in the latest blog update. “We focus on developing machine learning tools that identify and take action on networks of spammy or automated accounts automatically. This lets us tackle attempts to manipulate conversations on Twitter at scale, across languages and time zones, without relying on reactive reports.”
“Platform manipulation and spam are challenges we continue to face and which continue to evolve, and we’re striving to be more transparent with you about our work,” they add, after giving a progress update on the performance of its anti-spambot systems, saying they picked up more than 9.9M “potentially spammy or automated accounts” per week in May, up from 6.4M in December 2017 and 3.2M in September.
Among the welcome — if VERY long overdue — changes is an incoming requirement for new accounts to confirm either an email address or phone number when they sign up, in order to make it harder for people to register spam accounts.
“This is an important change to defend against people who try to take advantage of our openness,” they write. “We will be working closely with our Trust & Safety Council and other expert NGOs to ensure this change does not hurt someone in a high-risk environment where anonymity is important. Look for this to roll out later this year.”
The company has also been wading into its own inglorious legacy of spam failure by conducting historical audits of some legacy sign-up systems to try to clear bad actors off the platform.
Well, better late than never as they say.
Twitter says it’s already identified “a large number” of suspected spam accounts as a result of investigating misuse of an old part of its signup flow — saying these are “primarily follow spammers”, i.e. spambots who automatically or bulk followed verified or other high-profile accounts at the point of sign up.
And it says it will be challenging these accounts to prove its ‘spammer’ classification wrong.
As a result of this it warns that some users may see a drop in their follow counts.
“When we challenge an account, follows originating from that account are hidden until the account owner passes that challenge. This does not mean accounts appearing to lose followers did anything wrong; they were the targets of spam that we are now cleaning up,” it writes. “We’ve recently been taking more steps to clean up spam and automated activity and close the loopholes they’d exploited, and are working to be more transparent about these kinds of actions.”
“Our goal is to ensure that every account created on Twitter has passed some simple, automatic security checks designed to prevent automated signups. The new protections we’ve developed as a result of this audit have already helped us prevent more than 50,000 spammy signups per day,” it adds.
As part of this shift in approach to reduce the visibility and power of spambots by impacting their ability to bogusly influence genuine users, Twitter has also tweaked how it displays follower and like counts across its platform — saying it’s now updating account metrics in “near-real time”.
So it warns users they may notice their accounts metrics changing more regularly.
“But we think this is an important shift in how we display Tweet and account information to ensure that malicious actors aren’t able to artificially boost an account’s credibility permanently by inflating metrics like the number of followers,” it adds — noting also that it’s taking additional steps to reduce spammer visibility which it will have more to say about “in the coming weeks”.
Another change Twitter is flagging up now is an expansion of its malicious behavior detection systems. On this it says it’s automating some processes where it sees suspicious account activity — such as “exceptionally high-volume tweeting with the same hashtag, or using the same @handle without a reply from the account you’re mentioning”.
And while that’s clearly great news for anyone who hates high volume spam — and the damage spamming can very evidently do — it’s also a crying shame it’s taken Twitter this long to take these kinds of obvious problems seriously.
Better late than never is pretty cold comfort when you consider the ugly social divisions that malicious entities have fueled by being so freely able to misappropriate the amplification power of social media. Because tech CEOs were essentially asleep at the wheel — and deaf to the warnings being sounded about their tools for years.
There’s clearly a human cost to platforms prioritizing growth at the expense of wider societal responsibilities, as Facebook has also been realizing of late.
And while both these companies may be trying to clean house now they have no quick fixes for mending rips in the social fabric which were exacerbated as a consequence of the at-scale spreading of fake news and worse enabled by their own platforms.
Though, in March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey put out a call for ideas to help it capture, measure and evaluate healthy interactions on its platform and the health of public conversations generally — saying: “Ultimately we want to have a measurement of how it affects the broader society and public health, but also individual health, as well.”
So a differently stripped, more civically minded Twitter is seeking to emerge from the bushes.
Twitter users who fall foul of its new automated malicious behavior checks can expect to have to pass some sort of ‘no, actually I am human’ test — which it says will “vary in intensity”, giving examples such as a simple reCAPTCHA process, at the lowest friction end, or a slightly more arduous password reset request.
“More complex cases are automatically passed to our team for review,” it adds.
There’s also an appeals process for users who believe they have been incorrectly IDed by one of the automated spam detection systems — letting them request a case review.
Another welcome if tardy addition: Twitter has added support for stronger two-factor authentication as Twitter users will now be able to use a USB security key (using the U2F open authentication standard) for login verification when signing into Twitter.
It urges users to enable 2FA if they haven’t already, and regularly review third party apps attached to their account to revoke access they no longer wish to grant.
The company finishes by saying it will continue to invest “across the board” to try to tackle spam and malicious automated activity, including by “leveraging machine learning technology and partnerships with third parties” — saying: “These issues are felt around the world, from elections to emergency events and high-profile public conversations. As we have stated in recent announcements, the public health of the conversation on Twitter is a critical metric by which we will measure our success in these areas.”
The results of a Request for Proposals for public health metrics research which Twitter called for earlier this year will be announced soon, it adds.
