Browsing: privacy

The explosive popularity of YOLO has led to warnings of the same problem that led to Yik Yak’s shutdown, namely that its anonymity could lead to cyberbullying and hate speech. But in an age of online surveillance and self-censorship, proponents view anonymity as an essential component of privacy and free-speech. And our own research on anonymous online interactions among teenagers in the UK and Ireland has revealed a wider range of interactions that extend beyond the toxic to the benign and even beneficial.

The internet currently accesses about 15 zettabytes of data, and is growing at a rate of 70 terabytes per second. It is an admittedly leaky vessel, and content is constantly going offline to wind up lost forever.

As digital technologies facilitate the growth of both new and incumbent organisations, we have started to see the darker sides…

That didn’t take long. Facebook’s new plan to be more secure lasted just two months since Zuckerberg’s pronouncement in early March about this shift after 2018’s annus horribilis.

Governments and advocates in the U.S. and Europe, as well as elsewhere around the globe, have been pushing Facebook to make the inner workings of its advertising system clearer to the public.

Facebook started rolling out a new tool in April 2019. Under updated procedures, the social media website would request ID verification for people who wish to advertise or promote political posts or ads. The announcement received very little publicity, but it can be interpreted as Facebook’s latest attempt to curb Russia’s anticipated interference in EU elections and prepare to manage any meddling in the 2020 US presidential elections.

You might feel like you missed the VPN hype that spiked in the pre-local-Netflix years, so what even is a VPN and why do you need one?

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned instant messaging service will now give users the option to control who adds them to groups.

Facebook’s found a flaw in its systems that stored user passwords in plaintext. Which means you should change your password immediately.

Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest promise is that his social media conglomerate will become a “privacy-focused” one. By turns lauded and lambasted, this move does not quite address users’ primary problems with the company.