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Meta’s Pay for Privacy Model Is Illegal, Says EU
01 Jul

Meta’s Pay for Privacy Model Is Illegal, Says EU

stp2y0 CommentsRAG models, ,
For the past eight months, Europeans uncomfortable with the way Meta tracks their data for personalized advertising have had another option: They can pay the tech giant up to €12.99 ($14) per month for their privacy instead.Launched in November 2023, Meta introduced its “pay or consent” subscription model as fines, legal cases and regulatory attention pressured the company to change the way it asks users to consent to targeted advertising. On Monday, however, the European Commision rejected its latest solution, arguing its “pay or consent” subscription is illegal under the bloc’s new digital markets act (DMA).“Our preliminary view is that…
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My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now
21 Jun

My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now

stp2y0 CommentsGenAI, , , , , , , , , ,
In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the inhabitants of this new empire, it is only through this record of a retired school teacher’s humdrum rural life, his petty vanities and attempts to breed prize-winning chickens, that they begin to learn about 20th-century Britain.If I were to teach futuristic beings about life on…
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How small claims court became Meta’s customer service hotline
21 Jun

How small claims court became Meta’s customer service hotline

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Last month, Ray Palena boarded a plane from New Jersey to California to appear in court. He found himself engaged in a legal dispute against one of the largest corporations in the world, and improbably, the venue for their David-versus-Goliath showdown would be San Mateo's small claims court.Over the course of eight months and an estimated $700 (mostly in travel expenses), he was able to claw back what all other methods had failed to render: his personal Facebook account.Those may be extraordinary lengths to regain a digital profile with no relation to its owner's livelihood, Palena is one of a…
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Orkut’s Founder Is Still Dreaming of a Social Media Utopia
17 Jun

Orkut’s Founder Is Still Dreaming of a Social Media Utopia

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Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn't be able to scale. “They said, let's just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest is online history. “It grew so fast. Before we knew it, we had millions of users,” he says. Orkut featured a digital Scrapbook and the ability to give people compliments (ranging from “trustworthy” to “sexy”), create communities, and curate your very own Crush List. “It reflected all of my personality traits. You could flatter people by saying how cool…
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News on social media is a fractured mess, Pew study indicates
12 Jun

News on social media is a fractured mess, Pew study indicates

stp2y0 CommentsNews, , , , ,
Pew Research and the Knight Foundation just put out a pair of lengthy reports on how Americans are experiencing news and politics on social media. There are a number of noteworthy stats in the research but, for me, it mostly underscores that news distribution is kind of a mess.It’s not that news has disappeared from X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, but the way that most users are encountering news content is vastly different from platform to platform. And much of what people say they are seeing is not coming from journalists and media organizations but influencers other unconnected accounts.Perhaps unsurprisingly,…
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Messenger’s new community chats don’t need to be connected to Facebook groups
08 Jun

Messenger’s new community chats don’t need to be connected to Facebook groups

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Meta will now let you create massive community chats on Messenger with people you aren't connected to in any way. Back in 2022, the company launched community chats for Facebook Groups, giving people belonging to the same groups an easy way to talk in real time. While that community feature is tied to groups on the social network, this one isn't — it will let use Messenger like Discord to connect with as many as 5,000 random people using the app.The company didn't post an announcement, but it confirmed the new feature's rollout to TechCrunch. All community chats will be…
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Ex-Meta engineer sues company, claiming he was fired over handling of Palestine content
05 Jun

Ex-Meta engineer sues company, claiming he was fired over handling of Palestine content

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Ferras Hamad, who used to be an engineer working with Meta's machine learning team, has accused the company of firing him over his handling of Palestine-related Instagram posts in a lawsuit. According to Reuters, he is accusing the company of discrimination, wrongful termination and showing a pattern of bias against Palestinians. Hamad said he noted procedural irregularities on how the company handled restrictions on content from Palestinian Instagram personalities, which prevented them from appearing in feeds and searches. One particular case that involved a short video showing a destroyed building in Gaza seemingly led to his dismissal in February.Hamad discovered…
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Meta says the future of Facebook is young adults (again)
31 May

Meta says the future of Facebook is young adults (again)

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When you think of the 20-year-old social network that is Facebook, its popularity among “young adults” is what comes to mind. Naturally, Meta wants to change that and the company is once again telling the world it intends to reorient its platform in order to appeal to that demographic.In from Tom Alison, who heads up the Facebook app for Meta, he says that the service is shifting to reflect an “increased focus on young adults” compared with other users. “Facebook is still for everyone, but in order to build for the next generation of social media consumers, we’ve made significant…
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Instagram makes its status update feature more interactive
30 May

Instagram makes its status update feature more interactive

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Instagram launched Notes in December 2022 as a way for people to share statuses (not so dissimilar to Facebook) on the platform. Now, the Meta-owned app is taking inspiration from its sister site for more features, with the addition of Note Prompts.Instagram first experimented with Note Prompts earlier this year, and the feature allows users to share questions such as "What should I eat?" or "Who is going to be in X city this weekend?" Friends can then respond with tips, suggestions and random thoughts on the subject. It feels very Facebook circa 2012, as does another new feature, Mentions,…
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A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own
29 May

A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own

stp2y0 CommentsRAG models, , , , , , , ,
Allen, a data scientist, and Massachi, a software engineer, worked for nearly four years at Facebook on some of the uglier aspects of social media, combating scams and election meddling. They didn’t know each other but both quit in 2019, frustrated at feeling a lack of support from executives. “The work that teams like the one I was on, civic integrity, was being squandered,” Massachi said in a recent conference talk. “Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”Massachi first conceived the idea of using expertise like that he’d developed at Facebook to drive greater public attention to the dangers…
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