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’A totally different ballgame’ : Inside Uber and Lyft’s fight over gig worker status - 29 août 2020
Labor activists are targeted in a social media campaign as gig economy companies spend millions to prevent workers from becoming employees.
Veena Dubal couldn’t stop her mind from reeling. It was around midnight on March 29 and coronavirus lockdowns were in effect. She says she paced back and forth between her (...)
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A “Bug” In Instagram’s Hashtags Has Been Favoring Donald Trump - 25 août 2020
“A technical error caused a number of hashtags to not show related hashtags. We’ve disabled this feature while we investigate.”
For at least the last two months, a key Instagram feature, which algorithmically pushes users toward supposedly related content, has been treating hashtags associated with President Donald (...)
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Secret Service Bought Phone Location Data from Apps, Contract Confirms - 21 août 2020
An internal Secret Service document describes the purchase of Locate X, a product that uses location data harvested from ordinary apps.
The Secret Service paid for a product that gives the agency access to location data generated by ordinary apps installed on peoples’ smartphones, an internal Secret Service (...)
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How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices - 17 août 2020
In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook’s pushy interface. The platform had a way of coercing people into giving up more and more of their privacy. The question was, what to call that coercion ? Zuckermining ? Facebaiting ? Was it a Zuckerpunch ? The name that eventually stuck : Privacy (...)
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Egypt’s TikTok crackdown targets young female influencers - 17 août 2020
A vaguely defined cybercrime bill has seen the government convict Egyptian social media stars with millions of followers
When Mawada Eladhm began posting videos on TikTok, she had no idea that being an online influencer in Egypt was so perilous. Despite having three million followers, she became the target of (...)
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Under the Twitter streetlight : How data scarcity distorts research - 16 août 2020
As part of our #LeftOnRead campaign, several researchers testified to the reluctance of online platforms to provide useful data. Many resort to studying Twitter, which is more accommodating than most.
Tiziano Bonini, an associate professor at the University of Siena, began an ethnographic investigation of online (...)
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Facial Recognition Start-Up Mounts a First Amendment Defense - 16 août 2020
Clearview AI has hired Floyd Abrams, a top lawyer, to help fight claims that selling its data to law enforcement agencies violates privacy laws.
Floyd Abrams, one of the most prominent First Amendment lawyers in the country, has a new client : the facial recognition company Clearview AI.
Litigation against the (...)
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Peut-on militer sur les réseaux sociaux ? - 12 août 2020
À l’instar des combats féministes et écologistes, les activistes s’emparent des réseaux sociaux où fusent des photos de soutien et des hashtags. Peut-on encore parler de militantisme ? Comment conjuguer le monde « virtuel » du cyberactivisme et le monde « réel » des mobilisations dans les rues ?
Ceux qui fréquentent (...)
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The Inside Story of How Facebook Acquired Instagram - 11 août 2020
The social giant’s controversial $1 billion acquisition shows how a tech monopoly wields power
Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram was a watershed moment for Big Tech. It demonstrated just how much wealth and power the industry holds — and how it could be wielded. Secret emails, published as part of a (...)
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Instagram ‘censorship’ of black model’s photo reignites claims of race bias - 10 août 2020
#IwanttoseeNyome outcry after social media platform repeatedly removes pictures of Nyome Nicholas-Williams
Fifteen minutes into her shoot with model Nyome Nicholas-Williams, photographer Alexandra Cameron knew she had captured the perfect image : a dreamy split second with Nicholas-Williams bathed under natural (...)
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Facebook and Instagram to examine racist algorithms - 10 août 2020
Facebook has acknowledged that it needs to do more to combat racism on its platforms and is setting up two groups to examine its policies and algorithms.
Instagram’s Equity Team and Facebook’s Inclusive Product Council will look for bias in algorithms and work to make both platforms "safe and fair" for all. (...)
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Brazil Bolsonaro : Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters - 2 août 2020
Facebook has complied with an order by Brazil’s Supreme Court to block the accounts of a dozen top allies of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
The group are accused of spreading fake news against judges.
However, the social media giant said the measure was a threat to freedom of speech, and said it would appeal (...)
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The Constant Risk of a Consolidated Internet - 30 juillet 2020
A recent Twitter hack probably didn’t scare you. Here’s why it should.
Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama were all feeling generous on the evening of July 16, according to their Twitter accounts, which offered to double any payments sent to them in bitcoin. Not really, of course ; they’d been (...)
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Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat : qui chiffre les messages privés des utilisateurs ? - 30 juillet 2020
Le chiffrement de bout en bout peut protéger d’un piratage de grande ampleur, comme celui qu’a subi récemment Twitter, mais n’est pas mis en place partout.
Deux semaines après que des comptes Twitter de personnalités de premier plan ont été utilisés frauduleusement pour diffuser des arnaques liées au bitcoin (une monnaie (...)
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Une audition inédite pour les PDG de Google, Amazon, Facebook et Apple - 29 juillet 2020
Les patrons des GAFA passent un grand oral en visioconférence, mercredi, devant des parlementaires américains. Ils devront répondre à des questions portant sur d’éventuels abus de position dominante.
L’événement est sans précédent. A plusieurs égards. Jamais les quatre PDG des « GAFA » – l’acronyme désignant Google, Amazon, (...)
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Des utilisateurs découvrent qu’Instagram utilise à leur insu l’appareil photo des téléphones, l’entreprise promet que c’est un « bug » - 28 juillet 2020
La caméra restait allumée même si elle n’était pas utilisée.
Les questions de vie privée sont toujours au coeur de notre utilisation des téléphones. Est-ce qu’ils nous espionnent ? Les débats font rage et les articles se multiplient à ce sujet. Récemment, plusieurs applications ont été pointées du doigt par la version bêta (...)
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If you’re not terrified about Facebook, you haven’t been paying attention - 28 juillet 2020
Facebook and America are now indivisible, says the Observer journalist who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal – and the world is a sicker place for it
In 2016, we didn’t know. We were innocent. We still believed social media connected us and that connections were good. That technology equalled progress. And (...)
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An Instagram bug showed a ‘camera on’ indicator for iOS 14 devices even when users weren’t taking photos - 28 juillet 2020
The company says it’s fixing the issue
In the latest instance of iOS 14’s beta mode tattling on unexpected app behavior, some users reported that they were seeing the green “camera on” indicator while using Instagram when they were just scrolling through their feeds, not taking a photo or video.
An Instagram (...)
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Undress or fail : Instagram’s algorithm strong-arms users into showing skin - 21 juillet 2020
An exclusive investigation reveals that Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women, shaping the behavior of content creators and the worldview of 140 millions Europeans in what remains a blind spot of EU regulations.
Sarah is a food entrepreneur in a large European city (the name was changed). (...)
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New Zealand’s Stuff newspaper group joins Facebook boycott as ’experiment’ - 14 juillet 2020
Company says it has ‘paused’ its relationship with the social media company as part of global movement against hate speech
New Zealand’s largest newspaper group has temporarily quit Facebook in a bold “experiment” aligning itself with a global boycott of the social media site, which has been condemned for failing to (...)
