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Microsoft built its fortune making the tools of technology that billions use every day. But the company’s president, Brad Smith, has increasing misgivings about how thieves, terrorists and scoundrels have weaponised those tools, and how the industry has failed too often to thwart them. He chides Facebook for allowing influence campaigns to flourish on the

If you’re running stock Android, you’ll know the frustration of not having contact photos for most of your contacts. Thankfully, some apps can sync your Facebook friend’s photos to their contacts on Android, so you never have to see the placeholder head again. Let’s explore some great apps that sync up your friends’ Facebook photos

Is love the answer on Facebook? The huge social network rolled out its online dating service for the United States on Thursday, a move to take on rivals such as smartphone app Tinder, while focusing on connecting people in “real” long-term relationships. The free “Facebook Dating” site which was announced last year and already available

A coalition of US state officials announced Friday they had launched an antitrust investigation of Facebook to determine if the social media giant “has stifled competition and put users at risk.” New York state Attorney General Letitia James released a statement announcing the action on behalf of seven other states and the District of Columbia.

Advertisement Skype has added a host of new messaging features designed to improve the experience of chatting on Skype. This is an effort to catch up with the likes of Messenger and WhatsApp, which most people are more likely to use over Skype for simple text chats. The best-known messaging apps started out offering barebones

Pandora users can now share music and podcasts on Instagram Stories. Sharing content from Pandora to Instagram Stories is a really simple process, and it could even help your friends who don’t use Pandora get free access to the music and podcasts Pandora offers. How to Share Pandora Music on Instagram Stories As detailed on

Facebook is teaming up with Microsoft, the Partnership on AI coalition and academics from several universities to launch a contest to better detect deepfakes, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. The social media giant is putting $10 million into the “Deepfake Detection Challenge,” which aims to spur detection research. As part of the

Google and its industry allies are making a late bid to water down the first major data-privacy law in the US, seeking to carve out exemptions for digital advertising, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and people familiar with the negotiations. A lobbyist for Google recently distributed new language to members of California’s state legislature

Twitter has disabled the ability to Tweet via SMS. This feature has been present since Twitter first launched, but a couple of high-profile hacks have led Twitter to disable it for the time being. The company IS planning to bring it back though. Using SIM Swapping to Hack Jack Dorsey In August, the account of

Working in secrecy for a year, the Telegram messaging service has a plan: to beat Facebook in the race to launch a cryptocurrency with its new project “Gram”. Little is known about Gram, but media reports say Russian-founded Telegram aims to create an accessible service that is easier to use than various cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin

Facebook recently released a tool called Off-Facebook Activity. This tool gives you better controls over which apps and services can share your data with Facebook. If you want to stop your data from being spread from third-party services to Facebook, this tool can help. We’ll show you how to use the tool and what data

After Instagram, Facebook is also considering a test where ‘Like’ counts would be publicly hidden.  App researcher Jane Manchun Wong has found the code inside Facebook’s Android app that hides the exact amount of likes on a post from everyone but the original poster, TechCrunch reported on Monday. Facebook confirmed “that it’s considering a test

Spotify now lets you share songs to Facebook Stories. You can share albums, playlists, and your profile, but if you share single tracks they come with 15-second previews. Allowing people viewing your Facebook Story to hear a portion of the song. In May 2018, Spotify added the option to share songs to Instagram Stories You

Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked Friday, demonstrating the potential vulnerabilities of even the most high-profile social media accounts. Starting Friday afternoon, Dorsey’s @jack account began unleashing a stream of more than a dozen tweets and retweets, including obscenities, shout-outs, threats and racial slurs. The tweets remained on the account, which has

Who is tracking you online? You assume your ISP and the government. Google tracks you everywhere online, and offline too if you carry an Android. But what about social media sites, like Facebook? Facebook tracking is on par with Google. The social media giant receives multi-billion dollar fines for breaching privacy, tracking, and data sharing

Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging app, will allow users to cloak their telephone numbers to safeguard Hong Kong protesters against monitoring by Chinese authorities, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. The update to Telegram, planned for release over the next few days, will allow protesters to block Chinese authorities from discovering

US Citizenship and Immigration Services officers can now create fictitious social media accounts to monitor social media information on foreigners seeking visas, green cards and citizenship. An updated Homeland Security Department review of potential privacy issues dated July 2019 that was posted online on Friday essentially reversed a prior ban on officers creating fake profiles. A

Advertisement One of Telegram’s biggest advantages over similar chat apps is how easy it is to join channels and groups. Telegram channels allow you to meet up with people to talk about any topic you’re interested in. In this article we take a look at the best Telegram channels you should know about. With so

Take the post down. Put it back up. Stop policing speech. Start silencing extremists. That’s just a sampling of the intense, often contradictory demands facing tech companies and their social media platforms as they try to oversee internet content without infringing on First Amendment rights. The pendulum has swung recently toward restricting hateful speech that

Facebook acknowledged a flaw in its Messenger Kids app, weeks after two US senators raised privacy concerns about the application, and said that it spoke to the US Federal Trade Commission about the matter. “We are in regular contact with the FTC on many issues and products, including Messenger Kids,” Facebook Vice President Kevin Martin wrote in a

In the early days of Facebook, users posted all manner of personal and private data online. In hindsight, we were all green, but it didn’t feel like a privacy issue waiting to happen. Until it became a massive data privacy issue. Now, the best privacy practice is to keep your Facebook profile private to protect

A group of philanthropies working with Facebook Inc to study the social network’s impact on democracy threatened on Tuesday to quit, saying the company had failed to make data available to researchers as pledged. The funders said in a statement that Facebook had granted the 83 scholars selected for the project access to “only a

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday G7 members had reached an agreement on the taxation of tech giants, a long-standing subject of friction between France and the US which has threatened to retaliate with tariffs on French wines. Speaking alongside US President Donald Trump at a G7 summit in southwest France, Macron admitted that there

As user growth on various social media platforms in the key global markets slows down, India is helping social media players clock more revenue per user in the Asia-Pacific region, thus driving the overall social advertising spend, a new report said on Monday. According to Forrester, global social advertising spend will hit $165.6 billion in

Not just Facebook-owned Instagram, porn bots have now flooded Twitter and unlike Instagram, these spam accounts include photos of women in bikinis along with words relevant to trending topics on the micro-blogging platform to lure users. According to a report in Engadget, these spams show up under the “Top” tab of Twitter’s trending section and

Facebook in 2015 was aware that UK-based political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica may have been gathering users’ personal data but downplayed the whole episode till a newspaper revealed the truth three months later, show new documents. According to a report in CNET on Friday, internal emails by Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal, made available

Facebook is waging a war on many fronts today. It is misleading users into thinking their information is more secure than it is. It is using powerful political lobbies to influence government policies. And you can’t be anywhere on the internet without being tracked by Facebook. If you don’t know how bad the situation is,

Live streaming has become a part of nearly every social platform these days. This feature makes it easy to broadcast whatever you’re doing to friends and followers in real-time. But perhaps you don’t care about watching your friends make breakfast on Facebook and wondering how to turn off Facebook Live notifications. In this article we

Researchers worry that a new feature giving Instagram users the power to flag false news on the platform won’t do much to head off efforts to use disinformation to sow political discord in 2020. The role of Instagram in spreading political disinformation took centre stage in a pair of Senate reports in December, which highlighted

YouTube is killing its native messaging feature, which means you’ll no longer be able to send direct messages on YouTube. However, the chances are you’ve never actually messaged anyone on YouTube and weren’t even aware that YouTube Messages existed. In August 2017, YouTube introduced in-app messaging YouTube Adds In-App Messaging on Android and iOS YouTube