Technology

    Perhaps the most dramatic week in Facebook's history is coming to a close with no resolution in sight for the social network. Facebook's stock has fallen more than 13 percent since the New York Times reported over the weekend on a data leak that allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest 50 million users' data. The company's inability to prevent the leak, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's failure to acknowledge that failure, came after Kremlin-linked trolls used Facebook to try to manipulate the 2016 election. Heading into next week, here are the five biggest threats to Facebook in the Cambridge Analytica fallout. 1) The #DeleteFacebook Movement The #DeleteFacebook hashtag picked up steam as the week went on. Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook and mentor to Zuckerbe...

    Google has become the latest technology giant to offer an olive branch to media publishers, unveiling a $300m (£215m) three-year plan to revive an industry critics say it played a role in stifling. Under the Google News Initiative, the company said it would be rolling out new features to help boost publishers' subscription numbers and provide them with better tools to analyse and understand their readership. Among these is the Subscribe with Google feature, where users will be able to subscribe to a number of news publications, and pay for access to their content, through Google accounts. Google said it will take a cut of the revenue from the subscriptions generated through its feature, but said the vast majority of that revenue will go to the publishers. Accordin...

    The shocking revelations about Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica’s alleged use of 50 million facebook profiles has highlighted the dark uses of data we all share with the company. The scandal has wiped $35 billion off Facebook’s market value overnight, as consumers worry about how their Facebook data is being used. Searches for ‘How to Delete Facebook’ have spiked on Google as the scandal unfolds centred on how data from a Facebook quiz may have been misused. If you’re worried, there’s several steps you can take to make your profile more private or you can go the whole hog and deactivate or delete your account. How to deactivate your account Deactivating an account (found under Settings), lets you deactivate your account temporarily but you can reactivate it ...

    British MPs have demanded Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg gives evidence in Parliament following revelations about the voter targeting firm Cambridge Analytica. The founder of the global social networking giant is being asked to appear in a session hosted by MPs on fake news. The Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee today made the announcement as it accused Facebook of missing a deadline to supply supplementary evidence to its inquiry. There is a strong public interest test regarding user protection. Accordingly we are sure you will understand the need for a representative from right at the top of the organisation to address concerns. Given your commitment at the start of the New Year to "fixing" Facebook, I hope that this representative will be you. Channel...

    The claims that Cambridge Analytica used data harvested from millions of Facebook profiles to target voters in the US general election in 2016 raises tough questions for both companies. In what appeared to be a damage limitation exercise, the social network preempted the stories that appeared in the Observer and the New York Times over the weekend by banning the political strategy company from its platform while it investigated the claims. But this goes much deeper than that. Facebook’s 2.2bn active users might well wonder, how safe is their personal data? And is Facebook doing enough to secure it? And why did Facebook only react on Friday, when it must have known there was a potential problem many months, if not years, ago. In August 2016, it sent a legal letter ...

    The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the da...

    Our Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy two giant galaxies in our local patch of the universe are heading for an immense collision with each other in only a few billion years’ time. So which will dominate in this intergalactic tussle? Our recent work has turned up an interesting result on measuring the mass of the Andromeda galaxy, which at a distance of only 2 million light years is our cosmic next-door neighbor. Both Andromeda and the Milky Way appear to have about the same total mass, about 800 billion times that of our sun, suggesting that the result of this intergalactic gravitational battle may actually be a tie. In a few billion years, Andromeda and the Milky Way will merge. It is essential that we know their masses if we are to understand the details of t...

    Children need to be aware of the Internet risks that can expose them to bad actors and abuse on the web, a top Google executive said at an event here on Tuesday to commemorate Safer Internet Day 2018. We want to bring Internet for everyone. Keeping the web safe for everyone is a shared responsibility, Sunita Mohanty, Director, Trust and Safety at Google India, told reporters. While the Internet has made life easier by helping us share and receive day-to-day information, we also need to be aware of the consequences, negative experiences that make us vulnerable to threats. Women, children and adults are vulnerable to bad actors on Internet, hence there is an urgent need to sensitise them about the possible threats, Mohanty added. India has the second largest Interne...

    The mysterious murder case of a Canadian girl was solved after police found clue in the Facebook selfie posted by her friend. Brittney Gargol, 18, was found dead near a landfill in March 2015 and an autopsy later revealed that she died of strangulation. On Monday, Gargol's friend Cheyenne Rose Antoine, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Saskatoon Provincial Court in connection with the death. Police arrested Antoine after they found a Facebook selfie that showed her wearing the belt used to strangle her friend. The wide blue woven belt with a large buckle was found on a roadside next to Gargol’s body, and Antoine was seen wearing the same belt in a photo posted to her Facebook account just hours before the killing, according to the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. Where ...

    A massive WhatsApp security flaw has been discovered that allows anyone to infiltrate people’s group chats. Despite the service’s encryption, experts have said that hackers can insert anyone into WhatsApp groups without anyone knowing. The hackers can also insert the person without the permission of the chat’s admin who usually has to approve people before they are added to the chat. Despite the flaw being found, Facebook who owns WhatsApp, has said that they won’t be fixing the problem. They are adamant that group chats remain protected by the app’s encryption. Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote on Twitter that the bug is not effective because WhatsApp users are notified when new members join conversations. The study was presented at the Real W...