Facebook policy VP, Richard Allan, to face the international ‘fake news’ grilling that Zuckerberg won’t

An unprecedented international grand committee comprised of 22 representatives from seven parliaments will meet in London next week to put questions to Facebook about the online fake news crisis and the social network’s own string of data misuse scandals. But Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg won’t be providing any answers. The company has repeatedly refused requests […]

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Google’s News Initiative heads to APAC with grants of up to $300K for media orgs

Google is expanding its efforts to support media to Asia Pacific after the search giant brought its Google News Initiative to the region. Known as GNI, the program is designed to “help quality journalism thrive in the digital age” by providing grants (i.e. cash without equity) to media organizations that are judged to have potential. The […]

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How a small French privacy ruling could remake adtech for good

A ruling in late October against a little known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month, is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads. The excitement is palpable. Impressively so, […]

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Facebook bug let websites read ‘likes’ and interests from a user’s profile

Facebook has fixed a bug that let any website pull information from a user’s profile — including their ‘likes’ and interests — without that user’s knowledge. That’s the findings from Ron Masas, a security researcher at Imperva, who found that Facebook search results weren’t properly protected from cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. In other words, […]

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Facebook must change and policymakers must act on data, warns UK watchdog

The UK’s data watchdog has warned that Facebook must overhaul its privacy-hostile business model or risk burning user trust for good. Comments she made today have also raised questions over the legality of so-called lookalike audiences to target political ads at users of its platform. Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham was giving evidence to the Digital, […]

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Bots Distorted the 2016 Election. Will the Midterms Be a Sequel?

Tiffany Olson Kleemann Contributor Tiffany Olson Kleemann is the chief executive officer of Distil Networks. She formerly served in executive roles at Symantec and FireEye and was deputy chief of staff for cybersecurity operations under President George W. Bush. The fact that Russian-linked bots penetrated social media to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election has […]

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Campaign tool supplied to UK’s governing party by Trump-Pence app dev quietly taken out of service — thanks to GDPR

An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores. Its vanishing was flagged to us earlier today, by Twitter user Sarah Parks, who noticed that, when loaded, the Campaigner app now displays a message informing users […]

View More Campaign tool supplied to UK’s governing party by Trump-Pence app dev quietly taken out of service — thanks to GDPR

A digital revolution is reshaping Democratic campaigns

Two weeks before the 2016 election, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg published a story about Trump’s brash, self-aggrandizing digital team. Democrats treated the story as evidence of the Trump campaign’s utter cluelessness, until he won.

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Big tech must not reframe digital ethics in its image

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visage loomed large over the European parliament this week, both literally and figuratively, as global privacy regulators gathered in Brussels to interrogate the human impacts of technologies that derive their power and persuasiveness from our data. The eponymous social network has been at the center of a privacy storm this year. And […]

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Europe’s parliament calls for full audit of Facebook in wake of breach scandal

The European Parliament has called for a full audit of Facebook following a string of data breach scandals —  including the Cambridge Analytica affair. MEPs are urging the company to allow European Union bodies to carry out a full audit to assess data protection and security of users’ personal data, following the scandal in which […]

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YouTube CEO says EU’s new copyright legislation threatens jobs, smaller creators

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki published her quarterly letter to creators today, which included very strong language regarding the EU’s controversial copyright reform directive. Specifically, her letter focused on Article 13, the so-called “meme ban” that states that any site with a large amount of user-generated content – like Facebook or YouTube, for example – will be […]

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