Internet

Facebook and Instagram's "Oversight Board" received more than a million complaints about content moderation in its first year. But it investigated fewer than 100 and made public rulings in just 20 cases. The board is made up of independent members ... who have industry expertise but aren't connected to Meta, the company which owns both Facebook and Instagram. It has the power to rule on content moderation decisions, with the sites having to follow its judgment. It can also make recommendations for policy changes. Of the 1.1 million appeals from users, most involved content moderation for bullying ... (view more)

Did you get caught up in a romance scam? Are blackmailers threatening to expose your pictures and videos through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or LinkedIn? If so, you've come to the right place. Got questions? I've got answers! Contact me here to ... receive a complimentary phone consultation. Ask up to 3 questions, up to 15 minutes FREE . I've been studying this scam extensively since 2019, have completed over 1,000+ cases, and I'm happy to share my knowledge and experience with you. Too shy for a call? Keep reading - there's LOTS of good advice below, including insight into this crime you'll ... (view more)

Russia's government has reportedly spent $10 million bypassing its own bans on foreign websites. The country has blocked citizens from accessing more than 1,500 since invading Ukraine. The figures come from Top10VPN, a site that compares the ... features of virtual private networks. These are tools that let users access sites in a way sometimes compared to routing Internet traffic through a tunnel so that nobody can see who has connected to which site. VPNs can get round official blocks on accessing specific sites, particularly when they are policed by Internet providers following local laws. ... (view more)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined Twitter $150 million for unlawfully giving personal data to advertisers. The fine is so high because Twitter breached a settlement in a 2011 case. Back then, hackers broke into Twitter and were able to ... access personal information, including messages that users had set as private. The FTC said then that Twitter had misled users by making promises about how secure and private they kept user data. At that time, Twitter escaped any penalty but accepted a "consent agreement" to settle the case. That wasn't an admission of wrongdoing, but did mean ... (view more)

A former Facebook content moderator is suing the site's operators claiming the work mentally harmed him. Daniel Motaung says the low-paid work left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Motaung is suing Facebook's owner Meta along with Sama, the ... contracting company that hired him for the work. He says he was misled by a job ad that implied content moderation was a small part of a wider customer service role. He was recruited in South Africa and relocated to work in Nairobi where he was paid the equivalent of $2.20 an hour. He says this relocation made it more difficult for himself and ... (view more)

Facebook is to ditch some tools which tracked a user's location. It seems to be more about the tools being little used than a sudden interest in boosting privacy. The tools all involved tracking a user's location in real time and using the ... information to provide some sort of service. Perhaps the best known was "Nearby Friends" which lived up to its name, telling users if anyone they knew on Facebook (or at least anyone who also had the feature switched on) was in the area, allowing for semi-spontaneous meet-ups. The tools also included localized weather alerts. In both cases, many users ... (view more)

Twenty US Internet providers have agreed to offer low-cost Internet plans to people on lower incomes. The deal combines with government subsidies to mean many people will get free broadband. Following the recent infrastructure bill passing, the ... federal government now offers a subsidy of $30 taken off broadband bills for around 48 million households. The Affordable Connectivity Program covers low income households, plus those with people eligible for public programs such as Medicaid and veterans pensions. More than 11.5 million people have already claimed the subsidy. (Source: yahoo.com ) The ... (view more)

Google is making it easier for people to remove web pages with their personal contact details from search results. It won't remove them from web pages, but may make it less likely people will come across them. The policy makes information less ... visible in two ways. Firstly, it stops it appearing on the search results page through the extracts from the relevant pages. Secondly, it may make it less likely the page that hosts the content will appear in a search result. While Google is legally required to remove some personal information from search results under European privacy laws, it goes a ... (view more)

Microsoft Edge is getting what looks suspiciously like a virtual private network (VPN). It comes with a catch and requires some serious trust in Microsoft. The "Secure Network" feature is now mentioned in a support document and has also shown up in ... Edge for some users who've signed up for early access to in-development features. It appears to be a variant of a VPN, which involves routing internet connection through a VPN provider. The data traveling back and forth between the provider and the user is encrypted in a setup likened to a "tunnel" that stops it being accessible ... (view more)

For the first time, more than five billion people use the Internet. That means the proportion of the world who are online will soon reach two-thirds. The figures come from Data Reportal, which gathers together information from multiple sources to ... produce a global estimate. (Source: datareportal.com ) Its headline figures include five billion people using the Internet, meaning 63 percent of the world's population. It also says 5.32 billion people have a mobile phone (67 percent of the population), with around 80 percent of those handsets being smartphones. (Source: bdaily.co.uk ) The report ... (view more)