When RadioShack went bankrupt for the second time in two years and decided to close hundreds of stores, it forgot to do one important thing: Make sure the employees it fired didn’t have access to their stores’ social media accounts.
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RadioShack Stops Caring, Brushes Off Profane Posts By Rogue Closed Store
By 4.19.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
Facebook Hopes To Have Us All Staring In Awe At Blank Walls With New Augmented Reality Tech
By 4.18.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
This afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the hopeful next big thing for his company: augmented reality, allowing people to use their phones to interact with the physical world through their phones — carving virtual messages into table tops, leaving notes in public for friends that only they can see, and creating public art that is nothing more than a blank wall with people staring at their smartphone screens. [More]
Facebook Unveils Photo-Matching Tool In Effort To Crack Down On Revenge Porn
By 4.5.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
Two years ago, Facebook clarified its approach to complaints about supposedly offensive posts. Now, the company is circling back, releasing new tools to ensure people can’t re-share intimate images previously reported and tagged as revenge porn. [More]
Prepare For Onslaught Of Facebook Friends Begging For Donations
By 3.30.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
If Facebook wants anything, it’s to keep you on the Facebook site for as long as possible. That’s why perhaps it’s not surprising that given the popularity of personal online fundraisers, Facebook is now entering that business, letting people raise money for medical expenses, funerals, education, or any other cause. [More]
Facebook Messenger Adds Option To Share Your Location Live With Friends
By 3.27.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
For anyone who’s ever planned to meet up with friends in a crowded area, you know it can be frustrating to nail down exactly where you are, texting things like: “I’m on the corner by the bodega.” “Which corner/bodega?” “The one with the ATM sign.” “You’re dead to me.” Facebook thinks it can solve this problem by allowing Messenger users to share their location live. [More]
Report: Facebook, Amazon Among Tech Giants Interested In Streaming Thursday NFL Games
By 3.24.17
If the news that Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and YouTube are all reportedly interested in streaming Thursday night NFL games sounds familiar, that’s because these same rumors swirled last year. [More]
Why Are So Many Tech & Telecom Companies Bad At Respecting Your Privacy?
By and 3.23.17
The 21st century world is all about data: who has it, how they use it, when they share it, and how much they make from selling it. Despite the proliferation of terms of service and privacy policies, the companies responsible for handling our data are largely doing a poor job of telling us what they do with it. [More]
Surprise! You’re Not Getting A $250 Walmart Gift Card From That Facebook Link
By 3.22.17
The offer of free money is hard to pass up, but, as we’ve warned before, those promises of hundreds of dollars worth of gift cards, a free car or trip, and other too-good-to-be-true offers are just that. The latest version of this scheme involves a $250 Walmart gift card. [More]
Facebook, Google, Twitter Told To Revise User Agreements Or Face Fines In Europe
By 3.17.17
Operating globally is tricky: You have to know, and follow, the rules not just of the country where you’re based, but of the countries and regions where you serve customers, too. And for a major silicon valley trio, the way they serve customers in the European Union is apparently not up to snuff. [More]
Facebook Tells Developers To Quit It With The “Surveillance” Already
By 3.13.17
Your phone knows where you are, because it’s there with you. And when you use social media to post photos and talk with friends about an event you’re at, that’s data that can be scraped and used… including by cops who want to figure out what you’re up to. But not so fast, Facebook now says: If you want to build an app for surveillance, you’re going to have to do it without their data. [More]
Facebook Promises To Quit Snooping On Private Messages For Ad-Targeting Purposes
By 3.3.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
More than three years after a group of Facebook users sued the social media network, claiming that it was sharing links sent in private messages with marketing companies in order to boost its ad revenue, The Zuck’s company has agreed to stop eavesdropping on those communications. [More]
Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence To Update Suicide Prevention Tools
By 3.1.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
Two years after Facebook rolled out updated tools for suicide prevention, the social media network is revising those resources once again, this time to include artificial intelligence assistance and expanding the features to its other platforms Messenger and Facebook Live. [More]
Report: Facebook Wants To Livestream One MLB Game Per Week
By 2.22.17
In the social media version of keeping up with the Joneses, it looks like Facebook wants to get in on some of the professional sports action its rival Twitter is going after: The Zuck’s company is reportedly in talks with Major League Baseball to livestream one game a week during the upcoming season. [More]
Change This New Setting If You Want To Keep Facebook Video From Being Really Annoying
By 2.14.17 — Updated: 2.15.17
Facebook just announced several tweaks to the way video will start performing on its service soon. However, in the name of enhancing “customer experience,” Facebook is adding one change that is likely to drive a significant number of users slightly crazy: Not only auto-playing videos, but making sure to do it with sound blaring. [More]
Independent Auditors Will Check Facebook Ad Displays Down To The Millisecond
By 2.10.17
You can’t blame companies that run advertisements on Facebook for being a bit suspicious after the social media platform has acknowledged problems with over-estimating how long users interact with videos and how much time users spend reading Instant Articles and interacting with brand pages. Now the company will submit to an outside audit of that advertising data. [More]
New Facebook Safety Check Feature Lets Users Offer, Get Help In A Crisis
By 2.8.17
More than two years after Facebook launched its Safety Check tool as a way for users to let their friends and family know they’re okay in a crisis, the social media company is adding a feature that will allow people to ask for help, as well as offer it, when natural disasters or other emergency situations occur. [More]
Facebook: There Is No “Wonder Machine” To Automatically Detect Hate Speech, Abuse
By 2.6.17 — Updated: 4.5.17
Social media services like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of heat in recent years over many of the hateful things their users share with the rest of the world. Some have accused these companies of not doing enough to prevent this sort of behavior in the first place, but Facebook says there is really not much else it can do right now. [More]
You Can Now Use Keywords To Search Facebook For Friends’ Photos
By 2.2.17
You know that moment when you’re telling a great story, the one about the time your friend carved Aaron Rodgers’ likeness out of cheese and then married it, but in the moment, you can’t remember where to find the photo evidence on Facebook? Your storytelling skills may be vastly improved now that Facebook will let users search among their friends’ photos. [More]
