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Reports of Facebook's struggles are coming so fast and furiously that they are almost impossible to digest. It was particularly interesting to see the news unfold this week, as the social network tries to recover from a series of problems that are starting to be felt. Giving meaning to the news this week is exhausting, but join us to overcome the ups and downs of the Russian media mountain.
Monday: Facebook hits the ground in the process of execution
After a weekend in which the company was undermined by reports of a lawsuit by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development for discriminatory advertising practices and the "accidental" loss of old Facebook posts from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has tried in vain to conceal the sad news with – product announcements! In recent years, the company has introduced new fun tools such as photo filters and On This Day. Recently, however, these launches have generally provoked outrage at Facebook's failures – they are more of a quick fix than an innovation. Facebook arrived Monday morning with an update released Sunday that offers users more information on why they see a given message. Facebook has also shared a new decision support tool for content application, announced the removal of spam pages in India and Pakistan, and treated viewers in a conversation about the role of Facebook in journalism between Zuckerberg and Mathis Döpfner, CEO of European publisher Axel Springer, in which Zuck has considered paying publishers for news content. Zuckerberg even published an editorial on Saturday calling for a general European-style regulation on data protection in the United States; surprising, no? Not quite: the experts pointed out that this bait-change was an attempt to divert attention away from the regulation of the dissolution of monopolies (which would undermine Facebook's business model) and place it instead. amendments to the regulation on the protection of consumer privacy.
Tuesday: Facebook has asked users for their email passwords
The daily beast reported that Facebook is asking new users to provide not only an email address to log in, but also the password for this email address. Facebook is defended by saying that he was not storing these passwords, but also admitted that "this is not the best way to go about it, so let's stop to offer it ". This news was released shortly after the social User passwords stored on the network are stored in unencrypted text files and accessible to thousands of its employees. Facebook has inexplicably chosen to remedy the breach of confidentiality in a blog post titled "Keeping passwords secure".
It goes without saying that any network should never request or require a user's password for a fully separate platform. This is a shocking request even for Facebook, but this is not the first time the company has been using a connection policy raising eyebrows. In October, we reviewed Facebook One Click, a feature that allows users who forgot their password to click a button and log back in … even if they had not already tried it. Security and password experts are not impressed. tool or by this last security fall.
Wednesday: Facebook revealed hundreds of millions of user records
The security company UpGuard revealed that more than 540 million user records on Facebook had been exposed. User information was collected via third-party Facebook applications and included information such as comments, preferences, account names, location records, photos, etc., and was publicly stored on the cloud of Amazon. It's not Cambridge Analytica, but it's an extra reminder: the social network can not control the fate of its users' data once it's shared with external applications, or maybe he does not care. In fact, when UpGuard discovered the files exposed in early January, he contacted Cultura Colectiva, one of the companies responsible for the error, but received no response. At the end of January, UpGuard alerted Amazon, but nothing happened until this week. "It was not until the morning of April 3, 2019, after Facebook was contacted by Bloomberg for comment, that the backup of the database, in an AWS S3 storage bucket titled "cc-datalake," was finally secured, "UpGuard explained in a blog post.
The lesson, again: it's incredibly easy for Facebook's user data to be exposed and seemingly way too hard to secure them again.
Thursday: A master class on Facebook in non-responses
Facebook went on the offensive with a conversation between Zuckerberg and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. In the interview, Zuckerberg reiterated the same ideas on filtering content that he has been saying for years. In response to questions about the video of the Christchurch attack in New Zealand, broadcast live on Facebook, the CEO spoke in a rhetorical statement. "It's not clear to me that we wanted a private company to make that kind of fundamental decision about what the political discourse is and how it should be regulated," he said. he declares. Censoring or even delaying it would "break" the sound of the broadcast, he explained. This is a very strategic response from Zuckerberg, which gives the impression of agreeing with his detractors: if everyone is suspicious of Facebook, we may not be able to rely on big decisions like this. which should or should not be broadcast live. Maybe the public should be the referee, not a private enterprise. It's a school case that involves passing the baton, and that's another vague philosophical statement instead of a concrete response from Facebook.
Friday: Facebook hosts cybercriminals
Cisco security company has released a new report from its cybersecurity division, Talos, on Facebook's role in hosting spammers. Facebook groups, says Cisco, host various illegal activities, including phishing and credit card frauds. "In recent months, Cisco Talos has followed several groups on Facebook where there are often dark (at best) and illegal (at worst) activities," say the researchers. And it's not as if these groups were operating using some sort of code; they carry names such as "Spam Professional" and "Spammer & Hacker Professional" and even announce that users can purchase credit card CVV numbers. "In total, Talos has compiled a list of 74 groups on Facebook whose members have vowed to carry out a whole series of dubious acts, including the sale and exchange of card information. stolen credit / bank, theft variety of sites, as well as email spamming tools and services. In total, these groups had approximately 385,000 members. A simple search on Facebook gives many results, and once users join a group like this algorithm, Facebook will suggest even more. It seems that Facebook is not playing an active role in reducing this criminal activity, but that users are reporting it.
Despite this incredible amount of bad news, there was a very important and positive headline for Facebook: the company's headline increased, with the media result that "shareholders have become more accustomed to data leaks and Privacy "to shake the stock market, but adverse news on Facebook has become so commonplace that it is almost expected, and does not seem to hurt the bottom line of the company.
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