The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
Today Facebook announced new policies regarding removal of content deemed to go against community standards from Facebook Pages and in Facebook Groups, as well as measures to crack down on preventing those who have had their content removed from simply reinventing themselves in a different page or group.
While ‘archive’ had always been an option previously, now the only options for dealing with a received message in the Facebook Messenger app are ‘Mark as Unread’, ‘Ignore Messages’, blocking the sender, or deleting the message. Ignoring the message is the closest message option to archiving it, however that moves the message to “Message Requests”, which is not at all what you want to do.
The ability to “hide” a comment, as compared to deleting a comment, on Facebook has been around for a while, however Facebook users are still unsure of what it does. Does it hide it just so that you can’t see it? Does it hide it from all users? We explain, as well as explaining the difference between hiding a comment and deleting it.
Facebook has been sued by the Washington D.C. District Attorney for Facebook’s lax and improper handling of Facebook users’ data following last March’s privacy scandal in which Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest and use the personal information of 50 million Facebook users.
Facebook has, perhaps unintentionally, revealed that they are analyzing all of your images, taking note of the content of those images, and using what they find to further their reach.
Facebook has announced that up to 1500 third-party Facebook apps had access to user photos that they were not supposed to be able to access – including unpublished photos. The self-inflicted privacy hole was due to a ‘bug’ in the Facebook photo API which, Facebook says, granted the apps unpermitted access to the photos of as many as 6.8 million Facebook users for 12 days in September of 2018.
If you were required to re-enter your password in order to log in to Facebook today (28 September 2018), there’s a good reason: Facebook this morning revealed that it had suffered a massive breach, compromising as many as 50 million user accounts.
Earlier this week, in fact just before the 4th of July (was that planned, knowing fewer people would be paying attention?), Facebook announced that a “blocking bug” (actually an “unblocking bug – some outlets have been referring to it as a virus) had hit more than 800,000 users, causing people that the Facebook users had blocked to become unblocked, with no notice or warning.
Perhaps in keeping with their desire to be at the fore of the online dating frontier, it seems that Facebook is allowing profiles that are overtly sex ads. Or perhaps they just are eight years late to the rush to fill the void for online erotic services that was left when Craigslist shut down their ‘Adult services’ section.
One of the things that Facebook did right was not allowing people to see whether you are logged into Facebook. Unfortunately, they completely undid that when they rolled out Facebook Messenger, and the newest versions of Facebook Messenger turn out to be a stalker’s dream.
At the 2018 Facebook Developer Conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new entry in the online dating world: a Facebook dating service – specifically a Facebook dating app (so sorry web-only users, you will have to download the Facebook dating app in order to use the Facebook dating service).
In recent months you may have heard the term “FANG stocks” to refer to a particular group of stocks. More specifically, a particular group of high tech, high performing stocks. Those stocks are Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (hence F-A-N-G). Of course, the parent company for Google is now Alphabet, so these really should be called FANA stocks.
Following the revelations in the past week that political data analysis outfit Cambridge Analytica somehow managed to harvest the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users, and without the users being alerted, there have been increasing calls for Facebook users to leave Facebook for more secure climes.