Twitter cuts off API access to follow/unfollow spam dealers

Notification spam ruins social networks, diluting the real human interaction. Desperate to gain an audience, users pay services to rapidly follow and unfollow tons of people in hopes that some will follow them back. The services can either automate this process or provide tools for users to generate this spam themselves, Earlier this month, a TechCrunch investigation found over two dozen follow-spam companies were paying Instagram to run ads for them. Instagram banned all the services in response an vowed to hunt down similar ones more aggressively.

ManageFlitter’s spammy follow/unfollow tools

Today, Twitter is stepping up its fight against notification spammers. Earlier today, the functionality of three of these services — ManageFlitter, Statusbrew, Crowdfire — ceased to function, as spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra.

TechCrunch inquired with Twitter about whether it had enforced its policy against those companies. A spokesperson provided this comment: “We have suspended these three apps for having repeatedly violated our API rules related to aggressive following & follow churn. As a part of our commitment to building a healthy service, we remain focused on rapidly curbing spam and abuse originating from use of Twitter’s APIs.” These apps will cease to function since they’ll no longer be able to programatically interact with Twitter to follow or unfollow people or take other actions.

Twitter’s policies specify that “Aggressive following (Accounts who follow or unfollow Twitter accounts in a bulk, aggressive, or indiscriminate manner) is a violation of the Twitter Rules.” This is to prevent a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation. These services and their customers exploit Twitter’s platform, worsening the experience of everyone else to grow these customers’ follower counts. We dug into these three apps and found they each promoted features designed to help their customers spam Twitter users.

ManageFlitter‘s site promotes how “Following relevant people on Twitter is a great way to gain new followers. Find people who are interested in similar topics, follow them and often they will follow you back.” For $12 to $49 per month, customers can use this feature shown in the GIF above to rapidly follow others, while another feature lets them check back a few days later and rapidly unfollow everyone who didn’t follow them back. 

Crowdfire had already gotten in trouble with Twitter for offering a prohibited auto-DM feature and tools specifically for generating follow notifications. Yep it only changed its functionality to dip just beneath the rate limits Twitter imposes. It seems it preferred charging users up to $75 per month to abuse the Twitter ecosystem than accept that what it was doing was wrong.

StatusBrew details how “Many a time when you follow users, they do not follow back . . . thereby, you might want to disconnect with such users after let’s say 7 days. Under ‘Cleanup Suggestion’ we give you a reverse sorted list of the people who’re Not Following Back”. It charges $25 to $416 month for these spam tools. After losing its API access today, StatusBrew posted a confusing half-mea culpa, half-“it was our customers’ fault” blog post announcing it will shut down its follow/unfollow features.

Instagram caught selling ads to follower-buying services it banned

Twitter tells TechCrunch it will allow these companies “apply for a new developer account and register a new, compliant app” but the existing apps will remain suspended. I think they deserve an additional time-out period. But still, this is a good step towards Twitter protecting the health of conversation on its platform from greedy spam services. I’d urge the company to also work to prevent companies and sketchy individuals from selling fake followers or follow/unfollow spam via Twitter ads or tweets.

When you can’t trust that someone who follows you is real, the notifications become meaningless distractions, faith in finding real connection sinks, and we become skeptical of the whole app. It’s the users that lose, so it’s the platforms’ responsibility to play referee.

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Why You Should Be Like a Banana During Polar Vortex, According to a Meteorologist

As the Midwest deals with a record-breaking deep freeze, forecasters have repeatedly warned that the frigid weather could be life-threatening. Experts have urged people stay indoors as  even a short time in the […]

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Microsoft’s Touching Super Bowl Ad Unveils Xbox Adaptive Controller Designed for All Gamers

Microsoft is back after a four-year break from Super Bowl commercials: This year, the company’s ad will focus on its Xbox Adaptive Controller and gaming accessibility. On Thursday, Microsoft posted its 2019 Super […]

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Why Are Pigeons So Good at Surviving in Cities?

Take a walk in almost any urban city in the world, and you’re likely to encounter a pigeon — or 10. They zoom down streets between high rise buildings; they coo at you […]

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Facebook just removed a new wave of suspicious activity linked to Iran

Facebook just announced its latest round of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” this time out of Iran. The company took down 262 Pages, 356 accounts, three Facebook groups and 162 Instagram accounts that exhibited “malicious-looking indicators” and patterns that identify it as potentially state-sponsored or otherwise deceptive and coordinated activity.

As Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher noted in a press call, Facebook coordinated closely with Twitter to discover these accounts, and by collaborating early and often the company “[was] able to use that to build up our own investigation.” Today, Twitter published a postmortem on its efforts to combat misinformation during the US midterm election last year.

Example of the content removed

As the Newsroom post details, the activity affected a broad swath of areas around the globe:

“There were multiple sets of activity, each localized for a specific country or region, including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, US, and Yemen. The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as locals, often using fake accounts, and posted news stories on current events… on topics like Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, including the role of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.

Today’s takedown is the result of an internal investigation linking the newly discovered activity to other content out of Iran late last year. Remarkably, the activity Facebook flagged today dates back to 2010.

Facebook takes down more ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ linked to Iran

The Iranian activity was not focused on creating real world events, as we’ve seen in other cases. In many cases, the content “repurposed” reporting from Iranian state media and spread ideas that could benefit Iran’s positions on various geopolitical issues. Still, Facebook declined to link the newly identified activity to Iran’s government directly.

“Whenever we make an announcement like this we’re really careful,” Gleicher said. “We’re not in a position to directly assert who the actor is in this case, we’re asserting what we can prove.”

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Toy Story 4’s cast just finished their final recording session and it was a very emotional moment for all involved. On Wednesday, Toy Story 4 actors, including Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, and Tony […]

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Hidden Camera Captures Rare Footage of Siberian Tiger Cubs at Play

Here’s your dose of cute for the day. Officials at a nature reserve in Russia has released rare footage of endangered Siberian tiger cubs — believed to be 3- to 4-months old — […]

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Facebook users who quit the social network for a month feel happier

New research out of Stanford and New York University took a look at what happens when people step back from Facebook for a month.

Through Facebook, the research team recruited 2,488 people who averaged an hour of Facebook use each day. After assessing their “willingness to accept” the idea of deactivating their account for a month, the study assigned eligible participants to an experimental category that would deactivate their accounts or a control group that would not.

Over the course of the month-long experiment, researchers monitored compliance by checking participants’ profiles. The participants self-reported a rotating set of well being measures in real time, including happiness, what emotion a participant felt over the last 10 minutes and a measure of loneliness.

As the researchers report, leaving Facebook correlated with improvements on well being measures. They found that the group tasked with quitting Facebook ended up spending less time on other social networks too, instead spending more time to offline activities like spending time with friends and family (good) and watching television (maybe not so good). Overall the group reported that it spent less time consuming news in general.

The group that Facebook also reported less time spent on the social network after the study-imposed hiatus was up, suggesting that the break might have given them new insight into their own habits.

“Reduced post-experiment use aligns with our finding that deactivation improved subjective well-being, and it is also consistent with the hypotheses that Facebook is habit forming… or that people learned that they enjoy life without Facebook more than they had anticipated,” the paper’s authors wrote.

There are a few things to be aware of with the research. The paper notes that subjects were told they would “keep [their] access to Facebook Messenger.” Though the potential impact of letting participants remain on Messenger isn’t mentioned again, it sounds like they were still freely using one of the platform’s main functions though perhaps one with fewer potential negative effects on mood and behavior.

Unlike some recent research, this study was conducted by economics researchers. That’s not unusual for social psych-esque stuff like this but does inform aspects of the method, measured used and perspective.

Most important for a bit more context, the research was conducted in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That fact that is likely to have informed participants’ attitudes around social media, both before and after the election.

While the participants reported that they were less informed about current events, they also showed evidence of being less politically polarized, “consistent with the concern that social media have played some role in the recent rise of polarization in the US.”

In an era of ubiquitous threats to quit the world’s biggest social network, the fact remains that we mostly have no idea what our online habits are doing to our brains and behavior. Given that, we also don’t know what happens when we step back from social media environments like Facebook and give our brains a reprieve. With its robust sample size and fairly thorough methodology, this study provides us a useful glimpse into those effects. For more insight into the research, you can read the full paper here.

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Digital influencers and the dollars that follow them

Sunny Dhillon Contributor

Sunny Dhillon is a partner at Signia Venture Partners.

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Animated characters are as old as human storytelling itself, dating back thousands of years to cave drawings that depict animals in motion. It was really in the last century, however — a period bookended by the first animated short film in 1908 and Pixar’s success with computer animation with Toy Story from 1995 onward — that animation leapt forward. Fundamentally, this period of great innovation sought to make it easier to create an animated story for an audience to passively consume in a curated medium, such as a feature-length film.

Our current century could be set for even greater advances in the art and science of bringing characters to life. Digital influencers — virtual or animated humans that live natively on social media — will be central to that undertaking. Digital influencers don’t merely represent the penetration of cartoon characters into yet another medium, much as they sprang from newspaper strips to TV and the multiplex. Rather, digital humans on social media represent the first instance in which fictional entities act in the same plane of communication as you and I — regular people — do. Imagine if stories about Mickey Mouse were told over a telephone or in personalized letters to fans. That’s the kind of jump we’re talking about.

Social media is a new storytelling medium, much as film was a century ago. As with film then, we have yet to transmit virtual characters to this new medium in a sticky way.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t digital characters living their lives on social channels right now. The pioneers have arrived: Lil’ Miquela, Astro, Bermuda and Shudu are prominent examples. But they are still only notable for their novelty, not yet their ubiquity. They represent the output of old animation techniques applied to a new medium. This TechCrunch article did a great job describing the current digital influencer landscape.

More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela

So why haven’t animated characters taken off on social media platforms? It’s largely an issue of scale — it’s expensive and time-consuming to create animated characters and to depict their adventures. One 2017 estimate stated that a 60 to 90-second animation took about 6 weeks to create. An episode of animated TV takes between 1–3 months to produce, typically with large teams in South Korea doing much of the animation legwork. That pace simply doesn’t work in a medium that calls for new original content multiple times a day.

Yet the technical piece of the puzzle is falling into place, which is primarily what I want to talk about today. Traditionally, virtual characters were created by a team of experts — not scalable — in the following way:

• Create a 3D model
• Texture the model and add additional materials
• Rig the 3D model skeleton
• Animate the 3D model
• Introduce character into desired scene

Today, there are generally three types of virtual avatar: realistic high-resolution CGI avatars, stylized CGI avatars and manipulated video avatars. Each has its strengths and pitfalls, and the fast-approaching world of scaled digital influencers will likely incorporate aspects of all three.

The digital influencers mentioned above are all high-resolution CGI avatars. It’s unsurprising that this tech has breathed life into the most prominent digital influencers so far — this type of avatar offers the most creative latitude and photorealism. You can create an original character and have her carry out varied activities.

The process for their creation borrows most from the old-school CGI pipeline described above, though accelerated through the use of tools like Daz3D for animation, Moka Studio for rigging, and Rokoko for motion capture. It’s old wine in new bottles. Naturally, it shares the same bottlenecks as the old-school CGI pipeline: creating characters in this way consumes a lot of time and expertise.

Though researchers, like Ari Shapiro at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, are currently working on ways to automate the creation of high-resolution CGI avatars, that bottleneck remains the obstacle for digital influencers entering the mainstream.

Stylized CGI avatars, on the other hand, have entered the mainstream. If you have an iPhone or use Snapchat, chances are you have one. Apple, Samsung, Pinscreen, Loom.ai, Embody Digital, Genies and Expressive.ai are just some of the companies playing in this space. These avatars, while likely to spread ubiquitously à la Bitmoji before them, are limited in scope.

While they extend the ability to create an animated character to anyone who uses an associated app, that creation and personalization is circumscribed: the avatar’s range is limited for the purposes of what we’re discussing in this article. It’s not so much a technology for creating new digital humans as it is a tool for injecting a visual shorthand for someone into the digital world. You’ll use it to embellish your Snapchat game, but storytellers will be unlikely to use these avatars to create a spiritual successor to Mickey Mouse and Buzz Lightyear (though they will be a big advertising / brand partnership opportunity nonetheless).

Video manipulation — you probably know it as deepfakes — is another piece of tech that is speeding virtual or fictional characters into the mainstream. As the name implies, however, it’s more about warping reality to create something new. Anyone who has seen Nicolas Cage’s striking features dropped onto Amy Adams’ body in a Superman film will understand what I’m talking about.

Open-source packages like this one allow almost anyone to create a deepfake (with some technical knowhow — your grandma probably hasn’t replaced her time-honored Bingo sessions with some casual deepfaking). It’s principally used by hobbyists, though recently we’ve seen startups like Synthesia crop up with business use cases. You can use deepfake tech for mimicry, but we haven’t yet seen it used for creating original characters. It shares some of the democratizing aspects of stylized CGI avatars, and there are likely many creative applications for the tech that simply haven’t been realized yet.

While none of these technology stacks on their own currently enable digital humans at scale, when combined they may make up the wardrobe that takes us into Narnia. Video manipulation, for example, could be used to scale realistic high-res characters like Lil’ Miquela through accelerating the creation of new stories and tableaux for her to inhabit. Nearly all of the most famous animated characters have been stylized, and I wouldn’t bet against social media’s Snow White being stylized too. What is clear is that the technology to create digital influencers at scale is nearing a tipping point. When we hit that tipping point, these creations will transform entertainment and storytelling.

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Play These Nintendo Switch Games In 2019

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Wait A Little Longer For ‘Mario Kart Tour’ On Mobile

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Leaked TikTok ad deck suggests it has 17M+ MAUs in Europe

An advertising pitch deck used by fast-growing short form video sharing app TikTok has leaked, providing a snapshot of usage in its biggest markets in Europe.

The pitch deck was obtained by Digiday which says it was sent to a large (unnamed) European ad agency.

Metrics and gender breakdowns for the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy are included in the deck. The slides are dated November 2018.

Germany and France come out as the top European markets for the video sharing app, according to the deck, with 4.1M+ and 4M+ monthly active users respectively, and an average of 6.5BN and 5BN video views.

Next is the UK, with 3.7M+ users (and 5BN video views); followed by Spain with 2.7M+ users (and 3BN video views); and Italy with 2.4M+ users (and 3BN views).

Last summer Beijing’s ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, said the app had passed 500 million monthly active users worldwide.

Analyst estimates suggest it’s had around 800M total downloads in total since launch in fall 2016.

Although usage stepped up in 2017, after Bytedance shelled out to acquire rival lip-sync video app, Musical.ly — paying between $800M and $1BN to bag and merge its 60M (mostly US) users.

In the UK, France and Germany TikTok users open the app an average of 8 times per day, according to the leaked deck, vs 6 times in Italy and Spain.

While UK users clock up the most time spent in the app, with an average of 41 minutes per day; followed by France (40 minutes); Germany (39 minutes); Italy (34 minutes); and Spain (31 minutes).

Users of the app skew female across all five markets but the skew is greatest in Italy and Spain, which both have a 65:35 female to male ratio.

The smallest skew is in Germany where the female to male ratio of users is 54:46.

The pitch deck also details ad formats TikTok is selling in the region, covering four ad products and how they are measured.

The listed ad products are: Brand takeover; in-feed native video; hashtag challenge; and Snapchat-style 2D lens filters for photos — with 3D and AR lenses listed as “coming soon” (2019, per another slide).

The slides do not include prices for the ad formats but Digiday cites one media buyer who told it the company is charging $10 CPMs for fixed buys. Though it says another media exec told it agencies are being given different rates, noting the person had heard higher prices for the brand takeover ad unit for example.

We’ve reached out to TikTok for comment.

It’s time to pay serious attention to TikTok

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Hey film studies majors and noir aficionados, this Riverdale was written specifically for you. With Tall Boy dead and F.P. Jones the new sheriff, Jughead’s having a harder time than usual explaining away the accidental […]

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Social media should have “duty of care” towards kids, UK MPs urge

Social media platforms are being urged to be far more transparent about how their services operate and to make “anonymised high-level data” available to researchers so the technology’s effects on users — and especially on children and teens — can be better understood.

The calls have been made in a report by the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee which has been looking into the impacts of social media and screen use among children — to consider whether such tech is “healthy or harmful”.

“Social media companies must also be far more open and transparent regarding how they operate and particularly how they moderate, review and prioritise content,” it writes.

Concerns have been growing about children’s use of social media and mobile technology for some years now, with plenty of anecdotal evidence and also some studies linking tech use to developmental problems, as well as distressing stories connecting depression and even suicide to social media use.

Screen time inhibits toddler development, study finds

Although the committee writes that its dive into the topic was hindered by “the limited quantity and quality of academic evidence available”. But it also asserts: “The absence of good academic evidence is not, in itself, evidence that social media and screens have no effect on young people.”

“We found that the majority of published research did not provide a clear indication of causation, but instead indicated a possible correlation between social media/screens and a particular health effect,” it continues. “There was even less focus in published research on exactly who was at risk and if some groups were potentially more vulnerable than others when using screens and social media.”

The UK government expressed its intention to legislate in this area, announcing a plan last May to “make social media safer” — promising new online safety laws to tackle concerns.

The committee writes that it’s therefore surprised the government has not commissioned “any new, substantive research to help inform its proposals”, and suggests it get on and do so “as a matter of urgency” — with a focus on identifying people at risk of experiencing harm online and on social media; the reasons for the risk factors; and the longer-term consequences of the tech’s exposure on children.

It further suggests the government should consider what legislation is required to improve researchers’ access to this type of data, given platforms have failed to provide enough access for researchers of their own accord.

The committee says it heard evidence of a variety of instances where social media could be “a force for good” but also received testimonies about some of the potential negative impacts of social media on the health and emotional wellbeing of children.

“These ranged from detrimental effects on sleep patterns and body image through to cyberbullying, grooming and ‘sexting’,” it notes. “Generally, social media was not the root cause of the risk but helped to facilitate it, while also providing the opportunity for a large degree of amplification. This was particularly apparent in the case of the abuse of children online, via social media.

“It is imperative that the government leads the way in ensuring that an effective partnership is in place, across civil society, technology companies, law enforcement agencies, the government and non-governmental organisations, aimed at ending child sexual exploitation (CSE) and abuse online.”

The committee suggests the government commission specific research to establish the scale and prevalence of online CSE — pushing it to set an “ambitious target” to halve reported online CSE in two years and “all but eliminate it in four”.

A duty of care

A further recommendation will likely send a shiver down tech giants’ spines, with the committee urging a duty of care principle be enshrined in law for social media users under 18 years of age to protect them from harm when on social media sites.

Such a duty would up the legal risk stakes considerably for user generated content platforms which don’t bar children from accessing their services.

The committee suggests the government could achieve that by introducing a statutory code of practice for social media firms, via new primary legislation, to provide “consistency on content reporting practices and moderation mechanisms”.

It also recommends a requirement in law for social media companies to publish detailed Transparency Reports every six months.

It is also for a 24 hour takedown law for illegal content, saying that platforms should have to review reports of potentially illegal content and take a decision on whether to remove, block or flag it — and reply the decision to the individual/organisation who reported it — within 24 hours.

Germany already legislated for such a law, back in 2017 — though in that case the focus is on speeding up hate speech takedowns.

In Germany social media platforms can be fined up to €50 million if they fail to comply with the NetzDG law, as its truncated German name is known. (The EU executive has also been pushing platforms to remove terrorist related material within an hour of a report, suggesting it too could legislate on this front if they fail to moderate content fast enough.)

The committee suggests the UK’s media and telecoms regulator, Ofcom would be well-placed to oversee how illegal content is handled under any new law.

It also recommends that social media companies use AI to identify and flag to users (or remove as appropriate) content that “may be fake” — pointing to the risk posed by new technologies such as “deep fake videos”.

More robust systems for age verification are also needed, in the committee’s view. It writes that these must go beyond “a simple ‘tick box’ or entering a date of birth”.

Looking beyond platforms, the committee presses the government to take steps to improve children’s digital literacy and resilience, suggesting PSHE (personal, social and health) education should be made mandatory for primary and secondary school pupils — delivering “an age-appropriate understanding of, and resilience towards, the harms and benefits of the digital world”.

Teachers and parents should also not be overlooked, with the committee suggesting training and resources for teachers and awareness and engagement campaigns for parents.

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Facebook plans new products as Instagram Stories hits 500M users/day

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Stories the last big game-changing feature from Facebook, but after concentrating on security last year, it plans to ship more products that make “major improvements” in people’s lives.

During today’s Q4 2018 earnings call, Zuckerberg outlined several areas where Facebook will push new products this year:

• Encryption and ephemerality will be added to more features for security and privacy
• Messaging features will make Messenger and WhatsApp “the center of [your] social experiences”
• WhatsApp payments will expand to more countries
• Stories will gain new private sharing options
• Groups will become an organizing function of Facebook on par with friends & family
• Facebook Watch will become mainstream this year as video is moved there from the News Feed, Zuckerberg expects
• Augmented and virtual reality will be improved, and Oculus Quest will ship this spring
• Instagram commerce and shopping will get new features

Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook’s plan to unify the infrastructure to allow encrypted cross-app messaging between Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as first reported by NYT’s Mike Isaac. Zuckerberg explained that the plan wasn’t about a business benefit, but supposedly to improve the user experience. Specifically, it would allow Marketplace buyers and sellers in countries where WhatsApp dominates messaging to use that app to chat instead of Messenger. And for Android users who use Messenger as their SMS client, the unification would allow those messages to be sent with encryption too. He sees expanding encryption here as a way to decentralize Facebook and keep users’ data safe by never having it on the company’s servers. However, Zuckerberg says this will take time and could be a “2020 thing”.

Facebook says it now has 2.7 billion monthly users across the Facebook family of apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. However, Facebook CFO David Wehner says “Over time we expect family metrics to play the primary role in how we talk about our company and we will eventually phase out Facebook-only community metrics.” That shows Facebook is self-conscious about how its user base is shifting away from its classic social network and towards Instagram and its messaging apps. Family-only metrics could mask how teens are slipping away.

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Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings amidst a constant beat down in the press. Facebook hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 perecent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate. Facebook climbed to 1.52 billion daily active users from 1.49 billion last quarter for a 2 percent growth rate that dwarfed last quarter’s 1.36 percent.

Facebook earned $16.91 billion off all those users with a $2.38 GAAP earnings per share. Those numbers handily beat Wall Street’s expectations of $16.39 billion in revenue and $2.18 GAAP earnings per share, plus 2.32 billion monthly and 1.51 billion daily active users. Facebook’s daily to monthly user ratio, or stickiness, held firm at 66 percent where it’s stayed for years, showing those still on Facebook aren’t using it much less.

Facebook shares had closed today at $150.42 but shot up over 9 percent following the record revenue and profit announcements to hover around $162. A big 30 percent year-over-year boost in average revenue per user in North America fueled those gains. Yet that’s still way down from $186 where it was a year ago and a peak of $217 in July.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg went beyond his usual intro to the earnings report where he assures investors things are going well and highlights new opportunities. This quarter he noted “We’ve fundamentally changed how we run our company to focus on the biggest social issues, and we’re investing more to build new and inspiring ways for people to connect.”

Squeezing Money From The Olds

Facebook managed to grow its DAU in both the critical US & Canada and Europe markets where it earns the most money after stagnation or shrinkage in previous quarters. The fact that Facebook is no longer dwindling it its most lucrative markets is surely contributing to its share price climb. Facebook’s monthly active user plateaued in North America but roared up in Europe. That was shored up by a reversal of last quarter’s decline in Rest Of World average revenue per user, which fell 4.7% in Q3 but bounced back with 16.5 percent growth in Q4.

 

Facebook raked in $6.8 billion in profit this quarter as it slowed down hiring and only grew headcount 5 percent from 33,606 to 35,587. It seems Facebook has gotten to a comfortable place with its security staff-up in the wake of election interference, fake news, and content moderation troubles. Its revenue is up 30 percent year-over-year while profits grew 61 percent, which is pretty remarkable for a 15-year old technology company.

But morale isn’t quite as rosy. It’s been a brutal quarter for Facebook At least its swifter user growth rates show Facebook survived its biggest ever data breach without scaring off too many people. Meanwhile it’s continuously struggled with scandals like hiring opposition research firm Definers, and it saw its new teen app Lasso largely flop. Facebook will have to convince investors it knows how to win back the next generation, or at least keep squeezong a lot more money out of the last one like it did in Q4.

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Little Blue Penguins Stolen in ‘Late-Night Raid’ in New Zealand

A group of little blue penguins are missing after thieves broke into their nest in Napier, New Zealand. On Wednesday, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) reported a potential bird smuggling, and said […]

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Google+ for consumers will shut down on April 2nd

It’s no secret that Google planned to pull life support from the consumer version of Google+, its failure of a social network, in April. Until now, though, we didn’t know the exact date. That date, Google announced today, is April 2.

On that date, Google will start deleting all content, including Google+ pages, photos and videos, and everything else on the site. If you were one of the last few Google+ users — or you just feel nostalgic about the stuff you posted there — now is the time to download all of that data.

If your company uses Google+ (and there must be some companies that do), then rest assured you will still be able to use it for the foreseeable future. Google is only shutting down the consumer version, as well as all Google+ APIs. Indeed, those APIs, which turned out to be major security liabilities, will shut down on March 7.

And there you have it. That’s the curtain call for Google+, the social network that could’ve been, from an era when Google desperately tried to catch up with Facebook and Twitter and integrated Google+ into every conceivable product. It even went so far as changing its sacred search results based on social signals (which really didn’t work all that well). The result was a bit of a disaster for Google and it took a while to right the ship.

Google+ Is Walking Dead

Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug

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MIT Robot Learned to Play Jenga Through Vision and Touch (Just Like a Human)

Need a new player for game night? MIT engineers have developed a robot that combines both vision and touch to learn Jenga, a game in which blocks must be removed from a tower and […]

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Woman Turns Her AirPods Into Cool Earrings So They Won’t Get Lost

A Twitter user’s creative hack is taking over the internet: Meet Gabriella Reilly, a 22-year-old paralegal who turned her AirPods into chic earrings because she didn’t want to lose them. On Saturday, Reilly […]

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It’s So Cold in Chicago, They’re Setting Tracks on Fire to Keep Trains Moving

You may have heard: It’s miserably cold in the Midwest right now. The polar vortex is blasting cities with record-breaking cold, causing canceled flights, school closings, and dangerous conditions around the region. In Chicago, […]

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Senator Warner calls on Zuckerberg to support market research consent rules

In response to TechCrunch’s investigation of Facebook paying teens and adults to install a VPN that lets it analyze all their phone’s traffic, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. It admonishes Facebook for not spelling out exactly what data the Facebook Research app was collecting or giving users adequate information necessary to determine if they should accept payment in exchange for selling their privacy. Following our report, Apple banned Facebook’s Research app from iOS and shut down its internal employee-only workplace apps too as punishment, causing mayhem in Facebook’s office.

Warner wrote to Zuckerberg, “In both the case of Onavo and the Facebook Research project, I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook’s data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection. Facebook’s apparent lack of full transparency with users – particularly in the context of ‘research’ efforts – has been a source of frustration for me,”

Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them

Warner is working on writing new laws to govern data collection initiatives like Facebook Research. He asks Zuckerberg, “Will you commit to supporting legislation requiring individualized, informed consent in all instances of behavioral and market research conducted by large platforms on users?”

Meanwhile, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) provided TechCrunch with a fiery statement regarding our investigation. He calls Facebook anti-competitive, which could fuel calls to regulate or break up Facebook, says the FTC must address the issue, and that he’s planning to work with congress to safeguard teens’ privacy:

“Wiretapping teens is not research, and it should never be permissible. This is yet another astonishing example of Facebook’s complete disregard for data privacy and eagerness to engage in anti-competitive behavior. Instead of learning its lesson when it was caught spying on consumers using the supposedly ‘private’ Onavo VPN app, Facebook rebranded the intrusive app and circumvented Apple’s attempts to protect iPhone users. Facebook continues to demonstrate its eagerness to look over everyone’s shoulder and watch everything they do in order to make money. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s empty promises are not enough. The FTC needs to step up to the plate, and the Onavo app should be part of its investigation. I will also be writing to Apple and Google on Facebook’s egregious behavior, and working in Congress to make sure that teens are protected from Big Tech’s privacy intrusions.”

Apple bans Facebook’s Research app that paid users for data

Facebook isn’t the only one paying users to analyze all their phone data. TechCrunch found that Google had a similar program called Screenwise Meter. Though it was more upfront about it, Google also appears to have violated Apple’s employee-only Enterprise Certificate rules. We may be seeing the start to an industry-wide crack down on market research surveillance apps that dangle gift cards in front of users to get them to give up a massive amount of privacy.

Warner’s full letter to Zuckerberg can be found below:

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg: 

I write to express concerns about allegations of Facebook’s latest efforts to monitor user activity. On January 29th, TechCrunch revealed that under the auspices of partnerships with beta testing firms, Facebook had begun paying users aged 13 to 35 to install an enterprise certificate, allowing Facebook to intercept all internet traffic to and from user devices.  According to subsequent reporting by TechCrunch, Facebook relied on intermediaries that often “did not disclose Facebook’s involvement until users had begun the signup process.” Moreover, the advertisements used to recruit participants and the “Project Disclosure” make no mention of Facebook or the commercial purposes to which this data was allegedly put.

This arrangement comes in the wake of revelations that Facebook had previously engaged in similar efforts through a virtual private network (VPN) app, Onavo, that it owned and operated. According to a series of articles by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook used Onavo to scout emerging competitors by monitoring user activity – acquiring competitors in order to neutralize them as competitive threats, and in cases when that did not work, monitor usage patterns to inform Facebook’s own efforts to copy the features and innovations driving adoption of competitors’ apps.  In 2017, my staff contacted Facebook with questions about how Facebook was promoting Onavo through its Facebook app – in particular, framing the app as a VPN that would “protect” users while omitting any reference to the main purpose of the app: allowing Facebook to gather market data on competitors.

Revelations in 2017 and 2018 prompted Apple to remove Onavo from its App Store in 2018 after concluding that the app violated its terms of service prohibitions on monitoring activity of other apps on a user’s device, as well as a requirement to make clear what user data will be collected and how it will be used. In both the case of Onavo and the Facebook Research project, I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook’s data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection.

Facebook’s apparent lack of full transparency with users – particularly in the context of ‘research’ efforts – has been a source of frustration for me. As you recall, I wrote the Federal Trade Commission in 2014 in the wake of revelations that Facebook had undertaken a behavioral experiment on hundreds of thousands of users, without obtaining their informed consent. In submitted questions to your Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, I once again raised these concerns, asking if Facebook provided for “individualized, informed consent” in all research projects with human subjects – and whether users had the ability to opt out of such research. In response, we learned that Facebook does not rely on individualized, informed consent (noting that users consent under the terms of the general Data Policy) and that users have no opportunity to opt out of being enrolled in research studies of their activity.  In large part for this reason, I am working on legislation to require individualized, informed consent in all instances of behavioral and market research conducted by large platforms on users. 

Fair, robust competition serves as an impetus for innovation, product differentiation, and wider consumer choice. For these reasons, I request that you respond to the following questions: 

1.      Do you think any user reasonably understood that they were giving Facebook root device access through the enterprise certificate? What specific steps did you take to ensure that users were properly informed of this access? 

2.      Do you think any user reasonably understood that Facebook was using this data for commercial purposes, including to track competitors?

3.      Will you release all participants from the confidentiality agreements Facebook made them sign?

4.      As you know, I have begun working on legislation that would require large platforms such as Facebook to provide users, on a continual basis, with an estimate of the overall value of their data to the service provider. In this instance, Facebook seems to have developed valuations for at least some uses of the data that was collected (such as market research). This further emphasizes the need for users to understand fully what data is collected by Facebook, the full range of ways in which it is used, and how much it is worth to the company. Will you commit to supporting this legislation and exploring methods for valuing user data holistically?

5.      Will you commit to supporting legislation requiring individualized, informed consent in all instances of behavioral and market research conducted by large platforms on users?

I look forward to receiving your responses within the next two weeks. If you should have any questions or concerns, please contact my office at 202-224-2023.

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KFC’s Loaded Cheetos Sandwich Is Here to Sabotage Healthy Diets

On the post-New Year’s diet? KFC’s new Cheetos sandwich is a “hot mess” that will crash your healthy eating progress. On Tuesday, fast-food company KFC rolled out a limited-edition chicken sandwich with the […]

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Battle Between Steam and Epic Games Store Gets Bloody Over ‘Metro Exodus’

Last year when Epic revealed the Epic Games Store, a PC video game marketplace designed to give the Steam monopoly the first real fight of its life, we thought things would get ugly. […]

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