The Pigeon Express
Meta has announced new privacy features for WhatsApp users. Users will be able to leave group chats silently, control who can see their online status and block screenshots on View Once messages. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said this would help keep WhatsApp messaging “as private and secure as face-to-face conversations”. It will begin rolling […]
Facebook’s parent company Meta says it has banned seven surveillance companies for targeting users on its platforms. A new report by Meta says about 50,000 users will receive warnings about the “malicious activities”. It accused surveillance firms of actions like creating fake accounts, befriending targets and using hacking methods to harvest information. The company accused […]
Uber wants to make booking a ride in India as easy as sending a WhatsApp message. The San Francisco-based company has partnered with Meta (FB) to launch a ride booking ability via its WhatsApp service in India, the two tech firms said in a statement on Thursday. The integration allow people to book an Uber […]
Facebook has changed its corporate name to Meta as part of a major rebrand. The company said it would better “encompass” what it does, as it broadens its reach beyond social media into areas like virtual reality (VR). The change does not apply to its individual platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, only the parent […]
Facebook’s share price walloped by outage, stripping billions out of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune. Business publication Forbes reported that Zuckerberg has lost US$5.9 billion off the back of the global outage of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. This still leaves Zuckerberg with a cool fortune of around US$117 billion. The company’s share price slipped […]
Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suffered an outage that lasted for at least six hours on Monday, Facebook said. The company says the cause was a faulty configuration change. All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or on smartphone apps. Downdetector, which tracks outages, said […]
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission on Thursday fined Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp a record $267 million. The privacy watchdog increased an existing fine for breaking data protection law after European regulators complained it had been too lenient. Ireland is the home of the regional headquarters of major tech players — including Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter. […]
Ethiopia has begun developing its own social media platform to rival Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, though it does not plan to block the global services, the state communications security agency said. Ethiopia has been engulfed since last year in an armed conflict pitting the federal government against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which controls […]
Facebook earned $28 billion in revenue through advertisements for the second quarter of this year and its global ad revenue during the pandemic year totaled to $84.2 billion. This would mean that the social media giant earned at least $32 on an average from every user all over the world in 2020. Facebook witnessed a […]
WhatsApp has said it blocked over two million accounts in India in May and June for violating rules. The service said 95% of these users were blocked for violating the limits of the number of times messages can be forwarded in India. The submissions were made by WhatsApp in its first monthly compliance report under […]
A federal court in the state of Colombia dismissed two separate anti-trust lawsuits filed against Facebook. Judge James Boasberg ruled that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s anti-trust complaint against the social networking giant was too vague. Another separate anti-competition lawsuit filed by a coalition of states was thrown out because the alleged violations occurred too […]
WhatsApp is suing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration over new digital rules that will force the messaging service to violate privacy protections. It said rules that require tracing the origin of chats were the equivalent of keeping a “fingerprint of every single message sent on the service”. In February, the Mr Modi’s government introduced new […]