Facebook and Google have become the targets of the first official complaints of GDPR noncompliance, filed on the day the privacy law takes effect across the EU.

Across four complaints, related to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Google’s Android operating system, European consumer rights organisation Noyb argues that the companies have forced users into agreeing to new terms of service, in breach of the requirement in the law that such consent should be freely given. Max Schrems, the chair of Noyb, said: “Facebook has even blocked accounts of users who have not given consent.”

Data from millions of Facebook users who used a popular personality app, including their answers to intimate questionnaires, was left exposed online for anyone to access.

Academics at the University of Cambridge distributed the data from the personality quiz app myPersonality to hundreds of researchers via a website with insufficient security provisions, which led to it being left vulnerable to access for four years. Gaining access illicitly was relatively easy. The data was highly sensitive, revealing personal details of Facebook users, such as the results of psychological tests.

A new malware campaign has been uncovered on Facebook which not only steals account credentials but also installs scripts for covert cryptocurrency mining.

Cybersecurity firm Radware said in a blog post on Thursday that Nigelthorn is a new campaign which focuses on the Facebook social network. The malware is so called due to the abuse of a legitimate Google Chrome extension called "Nigelify," which replaces images displayed on a web page with pictures of Nigel Thornberry, a cartoon character from the television show The Wild Thornberrys. 

Facebook was recently hit by a huge scandal. According to media reports, data on the “likes” of 50 million Facebook users was harvested by the firm Cambridge Analytica and used for targeted political advertising. Facebook’s own behavior of added fuel to the fire of public outrage.

As a result, the company’s capitalization shed tens of billions of dollars, and a number of Twitter activists launched the #DeleteFacebook campaign. In our opinion, first, the action comes a bit late —the horse has well and truly bolted — and second, the incident underscores yet again people’s dependence on modern technology and vulnerability to it.

Opinion polls published on Sunday in the United States and Germany cast doubt over the level of trust people have in Facebook over privacy, as the firm ran advertisements in British and U.S. newspapers apologizing to users.

Fewer than half of Americans trust Facebook to obey U.S. privacy laws, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, while a survey published by Bild am Sonntag, Germany’s largest-selling Sunday paper, found 60 percent of Germans fear that Facebook and other social networks are having a negative impact on democracy. Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for “a breach of trust”.

Facebook has been collecting call records and SMS data from Android devices for years. Several Twitter users have reported finding months or years of call history data in their downloadable Facebook data file.

A number of Facebook users have been spooked by the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, prompting them to download all the data that Facebook stores on their account. The results have been alarming for some. “Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year,” says ‏Twitter user Mat Johnson. Another, Dylan McKay, says “somehow it has my entire call history with my partner’s mum.” 

The big data leak scandal over Cambridge Analytica's alleged misuse of Facebook users' data will increase regulatory scrutiny over the social media giant's practices, according to an analyst at a small research firm.

On Friday night, Facebook announced in a blog post that the company had suspended political analytics research firm Cambridge Analytica from its platform, suggesting it had not been honest about deleting user data sent to it by the makers of a popular psychology test app. Experts reported the data firm was able to acquire 50 million people's Facebook profile data without their consent. 

Facebook has recently addressed an information disclosure vulnerability discovered by the security researcher Mohamed Baset that exposed page administrator.

The flaw is a “logical error” that he discovered after receiving an invitation to like a Facebook page on which he had liked a post. “One day I liked one of the posts of a specific page but I didn’t liked or followed the page itself after a few days I got an email notification from facebook regarding an invitation to like the page that I did already liked one of its posts, I was amazed by the feature but i realized that this is a feature to target non-fans and I was wondering what could go wrong since this is a new feature?” states the blog post published by the expert. 

A recent Wired profile details the lengths at which Facebook employees are willing to go to ensure the company isn’t monitoring their communications. 

The piece examines two years of Facebook’s struggles, detailing everything from its Trending Topics debacle, to the dismissal, acceptance, and regret surrounding the hijacking of the 2016 US Presidential Election by Russian operatives. From its beleaguered CEO, to the increasingly paranoid people manning its workstations, one thing is clear: there’s trouble in Menlo Park. What struck me immediately was the lengths some employees felt were necessary in obscuring private information, such as location data, from their employer.

A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, are banding together to challenge the companies they helped build.

The cohort is creating a union of concerned experts called the Center for Humane Technology. Along with the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, it also plans an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort and an ad campaign at 55,000 public schools in the United States. The campaign, titled The Truth About Tech, will be funded with $7 million from Common Sense and capital raised by the Center for Humane Technology.