Facebook is spying on people in “the very same way” that the NSA does, said the Belgian data protection watchdog at a court hearing where the social network stands accused of violating the privacy of internet users.
The Belgian watchdog has filed a lawsuit against the social network, accusing it of breaching EU law and violating the privacy rights of internet users. The BPC issued a report, arguing that Facebook tracked everyone, even users who had logged-out and people who don’t even have a Facebook account at all, via the use of cookies and the ‘like’ or ‘share’ buttons which can be found on more than 13 million websites worldwide.
Read moreFacebook bounty hunter Laxman Muthiyah has discovered his third bug of this year in the social network website that just made a new record by touching 1 Billion users in a single day.
Laxman discovered a serious flaw in Facebook graphs that allowed him to view or probably delete others photo album on Facebook, even without having authentication. Just after a month, Laxman uncovered another critical vulnerability in the social network platform that resided in the Facebook Photo Sync feature, that automatically uploads photos from your mobile device to a private Facebook album, which isn’t visible to any of your Facebook friends or other Facebook users.
Read moreThree months ago, Harvard student Aran Khanna was preparing to start a coveted internship at Facebook when he launched a browser application from his dorm room that angered the social media behemoth.
His application was a Chrome extension that used data from Facebook Messenger to map where users were when they sent messages. The app also showed the locations, which were accurate to within three feet, in a group chat with people he barely knew. That meant complete strangers could hypothetically see that he had messaged them from a Starbucks around the corner, while he could see that they had messaged from their dorms.
Read moreYou may have noticed that Facebook has added a bunch of features over the past few years. Some are interesting, but most are either annoying or hurt your privacy. These features are entirely optional, but Facebook turns them on by default. I'm willing to bet that the company is hoping that you'll never figure out how to turn them off.
The point of course is that Facebook makes its money selling your data to advertisers. The more it knows and the more advertiser-friendly tools it has, the more it makes. Considering Facebook is free to use, that seems like a fair trade-off to a point, but we've reached that point. Here are some Facebook settings you might not know you can change.
Read moreThe mob is turning against Flash. Mozilla has blocked every version of Adobe’s Flash plugin from running within its Firefox browser, while Facebook’s head of security has called for Adobe to kill it off.
The moves come following a series of vulnerabilities in Flash being actively exploited, including those exposed by the Hacking Team compromise. Firefox users seeking to view Flash-based content, such as videos, adverts or more complex web tools for uploading images and other actions, will need to click again and accept a warning that “Flash is known to be vulnerable. Use with caution”. That means users of Firefox cannot use Flash by default.
Read moreESET researchers have discovered a new, ingenious, yet very simple Facebook phishing scheme: playable Android games that, before they are started, ask users to enter their Facebook credentials.
The researchers found two such games on Google Play. Unlike some other Android malware, these apps did contain legitimate functionality they actually were real games in addition to the fraud. Both apps were developed by the same individual, and have been available for download on Google Play for months. But obviously not all those who downloaded the apps and tried to play the games have fallen for the phishing scheme.
Read moreFacebook continues to refine what you see in your news feed. The social network that your mom uses announced that it will track more information about your video watching habits to include whether or not you perform any actions like turn up the volume or make a video full screen.
Facebook will use that information to place what it believes are more relevant auto-playing videos into your feed. Facebook recently announced that it would track how long users look at posts in addition to when someone clicks the Like or Share button to aggregate posts. Today's news is just an extension of that.
Read moreFacebook's photo-sharing app Moments will not be made available in Europe due to concerns about its use of facial recognition. The app, which allows users to share mobile-phone photos with friends without posting them publicly, was launched in the US this week.
The Irish data regulator said that users must be given a choice about whether they want it. There is currently no timetable for such a feature, said Facebook. Moments arranges the photos on someone's mobile phone into groups, based on when they were taken. The facial recognition technology can identify Facebook friends to whom users can then forward the photos.
Read moreLast week Facebook was full of shared posts like “Who is your true soulmate?” Serious people allowed Captain Quizz to get into their private account in order to find out who their true soulmate is. This is not the first or even the tenth application that is tracking you.
Two common features: app asks for access to your personal data, and users spread this app through the network. Someone, who is interested in data gathering, creates an app and then asks Facebook to announce and release it. Security experts are writing long articles that social networks are controlled by the intelligence services, and Big Brother is always watching you.
Read moreFacebook already offers lots of ways for people to share their photos with friends, be it WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook itself. Now it wants to help users share photos without posting them online at all.
The social network rolled out Moments, a free photo-sharing app that lets users create shared photo albums with friends from their smartphones. The photos are then stored in the cloud for free. For example, you can share pictures from your weekend hiking trip with a friend or a group of friends, who can then add their own pics to the album. Moments only stores photos you’ve shared, but it won’t back up your entire camera roll like, say, Google Photos.
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