Anyone who uses the Internet was aware of the big Facebook outage yesterday, October 4th, 2021. Of course, it didn’t just affect Facebook; WhatsApp and Instagram were down too. Here’s what happened, according to Facebook. That this system-wide, multi-hour outage came on the heels of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealing, among other things, that (she alleges) Facebook knew that the service was being used to facilitate human trafficking, knew that the Instagram platform was contributing to poor body image among teenaged girls, and intentionally was eliciting angry responses from Facebook users seems to be pure coincidence, at least if Facebook’s engineers are to be believed.

In what is the second-largest GDPR fine to date, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission announced today that they have fined Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp €225million, or the equivalent of $267,198,750.00 USD, for several gross violations of GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation in effect in the EU, as well as the UK since the UK’s ICO adopted it’s own “UK GDPR” following Brexit).

Google Photos has been backing up images and videos from social media apps by default. But going forward, it is no longer going to be business as usual as they are putting the backup feature on hold. Previously, the app would automatically upload images and videos on your iOS or…

WhatsApp is urging users to update to the latest version of WhatsApp ASAP, after it was revealed that WhatsApp spyware – believed to be the handiwork of Israeli cyber company NSO – has been installed on countless phones.

In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg (in)famously announced that “Privacy was no longer the social norm.” That was when Facebook reset (relaxed) the privacy settings for all of their users. So the Internet sat up and took notice when yesterday Mark Zuckerberg said “I believe we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it.”

Reports are saying that WhatsApp users are leaving WhatsApp and signing up with an alternative to WhatsApp at an astonishing rate since the announcement that Facebook is aquiring WhatsApp for $19billion. While the WhatsApp outage that happened just a few days after the announcement hasn’t helped, most industry sources say that the international userbase is jumping ship primarily over privacy concerns, with users trusting neither the United States in general, nor Facebook in particular, to protect their privacy.

Facebook has announced that it will buy the international text messaging application What’sApp for $16 billion in cash plus $3 billion worth of Facebook stock. Now, Facebook already has its own message app with Facebook Messenger. So, what does Faceboo want with WhatsApp?