Meta’s latest fines bring the total penalties incurred by the tech giant to more than €1 billion over the last 12 months.

On Wednesday 4 January, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) imposed two sizeable fines on the social media giant totalling €390 million for GDPR violations.

A lengthy probe by the data protection watchdog found that Meta’s use of data across its Facebook and Instagram platforms was unlawful.

The DPC investigation was launched following complaints made by privacy campaigner Max Schrems in 2018. The complaint argued that, in order to comply with the newly-implemented regulations, both platforms requested users click “I accept” to confirm they agreed to updated conditions for ad targeting purposes.

According to the DPC, this meant the social media company had “forced” user consent to data processing unless they left the social media platforms, resulting in a breach of privacy regulations.

An initial fine of €210 million was issued for GDPR violations on Facebook, the DPC said, while a second €180 million fine was also related to breaches by Instagram.

In a ruling on Wednesday, the DPC said that Meta must also bring its data processing operations in line with GDPR requirements within three months.

Meta said it plans to appeal the ruling, and told CNBC that the decision will not result in a ban on personalised advertising on Meta platforms.

“The suggestions that personalised ads can no longer be offered by Meta across Europe unless each user’s agreement has first been sought is incorrect,” a spokesperson for the company said.

“There has been a lack of regulatory clarity on this issue, and the debate among regulators and policymakers around which legal basis is most appropriated in a given situation has been ongoing for some time,” the statement added.

Forrester analyst Stephanie Liu warned that if the ruling stands, however, Meta will likely be forced to “explicitly ask users for consent for behavioural advertising” - or find a workaround.

“It would also need processes, workflows, and capabilities to disable targeted advertising for users who don’t consent while also convincing advertisers that its properties are still worthy of their ad budgets,” Liu added.

Recurring Meta fines

This latest batch of fines marks the climax of a difficult 12 months for the social media giant. Across the past year, Meta has incurred more than €1 billion in fines from European regulators.

In November, the company was fined €265 million by the DPC after a lengthy probe into a damaging data scraping incident.

The 17-month inquiry found that personal data belonging to more than 533 million Facebook users was publicly available online, and had been scraped from the platform over a 15-month period between May 2018 and September 2019.

Two months prior, in September 2022, regulators also imposed a €405 million fine after Instagram was found to have mishandled teenagers’ personal information.

This consistent wave of regulatory crackdowns has prompted the tech giant to set aside a €2bn (£1.7bn) fund to accommodate for penalties expected across 2023, according to reports from the Irish Times.

Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a lawsuit which accused the tech giant of allowing Cambridge Analytica to access users' personal information.

The settlement, detailed in a court filing on Thursday, will be the largest ever monetary penalty for a US data privacy class action suit and the largest sum Meta has paid to resolve a lawsuit.

"This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case," the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver, said in a joint statement to Reuters.

Meta will not admit wrongdoing for its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal as part of the settlement, documents reveal.

The tech giant said in a statement on Thursday that settling the case was in the “best interest of our community and shareholders” and confirmed that it has introduced new organisational processes to avoid similar incidents occurring again.

“Over the last three years we have revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy programme,” a spokesperson said.

This settlement brings to a close a long-running lawsuit against the social media platform in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The UK-based firm was found to have gained access to personal information belonging to millions of Facebook accounts in 2016, which it used to profile and target voters ahead of the 2016 US presidential election and Brexit referendum.

Cambridge Analytica was found to have harvested data on up to 87 million users without consent after Facebook allowed it to deploy an app on the social media platform.

In the wake of the discovery, the social media firm came under intense scrutiny from lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 2019 agreed to pay a $5 billion fine to settle an FTC probe into its data practices.

Meta was also fined $100 million by the US Security and Exchange Commission amid claims that it misled shareholders over the misuse of user data during that period.

The record settlement also follows a number of recent fines issued by EU-based regulators over the company’s handling of user data.

In November, Ireland’s data Protection Commission (DPC) announced plans to impose a €265 million fine following an investigation into a data breach which saw the personal details of more than 500 million users published online.

The inquiry into the data scraping breach ruled that Meta had infringed two articles of EU data protection laws.

Meta has been fined €265m (£228m) by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), following a prolonged inquiry into a data scraping incident.

The DPC imposed a reprimand against Meta, leveraged the administrative fine against the firm, and ordered it to take specific remedial measures within a specific time frame in order to bring its processing of personal data into compliance with EU law.

The decision comes after a 17-month inquiry into the company, after it was discovered that personal data from the Facebook accounts of 533 million users was publicly available on a hacking forum.

This had been scraped from Facebook between May 2018 and September 2019 through the use of tools intended to link users to their friends using phone numbers.

As part of its decision, the DPC did not find that the incident constituted a hack, data breach, or security practice failing. In a press release on the decision, the DPC stated that the inquiry and decision process included “cooperation with all of the other data protection supervisory authorities within the EU”, and that all agreed on the final decision.

"Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how our business works,” a Meta spokesperson told IT Pro.

“That’s why we have cooperated fully with the Irish Data Protection Commission on this important issue. We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers.

“Unauthorised data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules and we will continue working with our peers on this industry challenge. We are reviewing this decision carefully.”

The decision has brought the total amount that Meta has paid in data privacy fines within Europe to €1 billion (£863,000), with the DPC having ordered Meta subsidiary Instagram to pay a record €405 million in September for a violation of GDPR involving data processing for the platform’s 13-17-year-old users. The commission found that children in this age range could set up business accounts, set to 'public' by default.

“Meta is on a losing streak,” said Sarah Coop, analyst at data and analytics company GlobalData.

“Privacy breaches damage consumer trust, which is already dwindling for Meta. Its central social media platform, Facebook, is struggling to attract younger users due to strong competition from other platforms like TikTok. The company has also reportedly lost $9.4 billion on its metaverse business unit and has recently restructured, laying off 11,000 employees.”

“GDPR fines are simply collateral damage for Big Tech. While fines can be large, at up to 4% of global turnover, most Big Tech consider it the cost of doing business. However, consumer confidence will be important for the metaverse, and cybersecurity breaches and data privacy fines further taint Meta’s already tarnished reputation.”

However, some in the industry have pointed out that the mishandling of personal data is far from a problem unique to Meta.

“Meta should not be the scapegoat of those worried about misuse of personal data,” said Paul Brucciana, cyber security advisor at WithSecure

“4.1 billion records leaked in the first 6 months of 2019 alone. In a recent poll of 1,000 US companies, nearly half (45%) claim they have faced a major data breach within the past five years. The situation is unlikely to be less grave anywhere else.”

In addition to following the decision made by the DPC, Meta has outlined a number of practices that it has already implemented in order to tackle data scraping on its platforms.

The firm has employed tactics such as rate limiting to prevent scrapers from using platforms at an abnormal speed, automated tools for investigation, and hunting down datasets with the help of threat intelligence researchers.

Meta stated that users can tailor their privacy settings to limit the amount of data visible on their profile, which in turn reduces data misuse.

The fine comes amidst a record low for Meta’s finances. In October, the company’s earnings call painted a bleak picture, with net income down 52% against a 19% surge in spending.

The firm’s commitment to developing metaverse tech, driven in no small part by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has led to record spending by the company on its Reality Labs division, with almost $10 billion allocated this year alone, and more locked in for 2023.

Since its earnings call, Meta has cut 11,000 staff amidst calls by Zuckerberg for a more capital-efficient company. The firm has admitted that its growth has not hit the anticipated targets, and Zuckerberg has indicated that its current financial situation is down to a mixture of macroeconomic factors and an overly-optimistic investment strategy.

Meta has announced plans to make 11,000 staff redundant, in a company-wide move to cut back spending following record drops in revenue.

The tech giant has announced the cutback of around 13% of its staff following a financial period that has not seen the financial growth it had anticipated. In the current environment, the company states it cannot keep up its current level of investment.

Employees were notified in a communication by Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO at Meta. At the same time as the cuts were announced, it was also stated that a hiring freeze would carry forward into Q1 2023, with some exceptions, and would be reevaluated, then, in line with business performance and macroeconomic headwinds.

“In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient,” said Zuckerberg, in his message to employees.

“We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint.

“We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.”

Employees made redundant in the decision will receive 16 weeks of base pay, with another two weeks added for each year of their service with no maximum amount. Meta also announced that newly-fired employees will continue to receive healthcare benefits for six months, as well as careers and visa advice.

“For those working in the social media and digital tech sector, this announcement from Meta could not have come at a worse time,” said Kevin Poulter, Employment Partner at Freeths.

“Although it is anticipated that the cuts in the UK will be a small portion of those in the US, the impact on the sector could be huge. Confidence in the tech job market, the opportunity to move freely and easily between established and start-up companies and the once-celebrated people-centric culture have been diminished if not wholly undermined within a week. How this will affect investment in these organisations, large and small, is yet to be seen, but if the leading lights of Twitter and Meta are now approaching the future cautiously, others are likely to follow.”

Meta has been moving towards such a cut for several months. In October, the company cancelled planned internships, stating that it was shifting its hiring strategy in line with business needs going into 2023. The move prompted criticism from industry experts, who pointed to the ongoing skills shortage to argue that short-term cost-cutting measures like cancelling internships and graduate schemes will only exacerbate the problem in the long term.

Its Q3 2022 earnings call deepened concerns for investors, as the company announced a 52% year-on-year drop in net income, alongside a 19% surge in spending across the same period. Following the call, the value of the company fell by over $65 billion, charting a dramatic drop in investor confidence.

Meta’s financial situation has been openly questioned throughout the year, as the company has doubled down on investment in metaverse technology, which some call a waste of time. Reality Labs, the wing of Meta charged with research and development in metaverse tech, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR), cost the company $3.7 billion in Q3 alone, and Meta admits that its operating losses are expected to grow in 2023.

In addition to increased spending, Apple's privacy improvements have cost Meta around $10 billion in 2022 alone, while the company has also been hit especially hard by the strength of the dollar throughout 2022. This has impacted international sales and advertising revenue, which is doubly affected by industry-wide cutbacks in spending driven by high inflation.

Meta’s decision is the latest in a series of such cutbacks among some of the world’s largest tech firms. At the start of November, Twitter fired around 3,700 employees immediately following its acquisition by Elon Musk, and was reported by Reuters to be looking for up to $1 billion in infrastructure cuts. In September, cloud communications platform Twilio announced 11% of its workforce would be cut, citing concerns over the sustainability of its growth similar to Meta, while Google has ordered staff to improve efficiency, and reportedly abandoned a Pixelbook range to deal with macroeconomic pressure.

The numbers are in for Meta’s third quarter, and they presented a picture of a company battered by stiff competition, economic headwinds, but above all else a devotion to metaverse tech that continues to degrade investor confidence.

In its most recent earnings report, Meta (née Facebook) announced that net income was down 52% year on year, while spending had surged 19% year on year across the same period, driven by the twin pressures of economic shifts and in-house metaverse spending. Overall, revenue across the quarter was down 4% year on year at $27.7 billion as company sales continued to decline in a year which was also mired by struggling performance with advertising too.

Meta says it has taken financial challenges into consideration with its 2023 budgeting, and is applying scrutiny to “almost all” of its investment portfolios with macro effects in mind. But there is every sign that in the coming year, Meta investors have something of a bitter pill to swallow. When it comes to Reality Labs, the Meta business tasked with the firm’s virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and headline-grabbing ‘metaverse’ development, costs show no signs of decreasing.

In fact, the company said in the report that it actually expects to spend even more on its VR ventures in the coming year than ever before, a fact made more shocking - especially to investors - by the context of the business's financial situation. Reality Labs’ operating cost for Q3 was $3.7 billion, adding to overall losses of more than $9 billion in 2022 so far. On this trajectory, losses are almost guaranteed to exceed the $10 billion reported for 2021, and the company admits that its projections account for even more to be poured into the venture in the coming year.

“We do anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year over year,” said Dave Wehner, chief financial officer at Meta.

This would be a perilous undertaking with a clear end goal in mind, a spending gauntlet for the company to run amidst the global economic downturn, in pursuit of the glory of pioneering a new technological standard for all corners of life. But the tech giant’s gambit is even more baffling for the simple reason that as yet, there is no compelling use case for metaverse technology. For all the money poured into it, the virtual reality oasis that Zuckerberg promises at each company announcement has yet to materialise, and each iteration presented thus far has prompted comments that the overarching idea for metaverse is a waste of time.

In response to a question on the rollout of metaverse tech, Zuckerberg indicated that although people might argue that it’s a bad investment, he believes that the technology will be important for the future, and it is therefore worth investing in. Speaking to the nervousness of investors, he also stressed that those with patience will be rewarded in due course. Whether that will pay off is anyone's guess.

The Guardian reported that Meta shares fell 19% in after-hours reading following the call, slashing company value by more than $65 billion, and shares overall are trading almost 60% lower than they were in Q1.

Increased Reality Labs costs are, in part, driven by the launch of Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 virtual reality headset, as well as due to the annual salaries of new employees. Indeed, Meta has increased its workforce by 28% over the past year, with 87,314 employees now working for the company.

With salary costs this high, Meta could replicate cost-cutting moves of other big tech companies, such as Microsoft’s hiring slowdown or even Twilio’s 11% cut to workforce. The company already cancelled internships for 2023, with candidates that had already been offered placements informed of the cost-cutting measure via email, as the company admitted it was evaluating its 2023 hiring strategy.

Of course, Reality Labs was far from the only contributing factor to Meta’s downturn this quarter. As with Microsoft’s quarterly earnings, the strength of the dollar across the period affected international sales unfavourably, and advertising demand across the sector is slowing as inflation bites into company budgets. Apple's implementation of greater privacy measures in iOS 14.5 also bit into the effectiveness of Facebook identifying trackers, in a move that Meta says will directly cost it $10 billion in 2022.

Competition is proving troubling for the company, as it faces a real rival in TikTok, the favoured app of Gen-Z. The firm, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, offers users short-form videos, and an advanced content algorithm, in a strategy that has become both hugely popular and incredibly profitable, even as it faces calls to be removed from app stores for national security.

“To remain competitive with the likes of TikTok, whose UK sales surged sixfold to almost $1 billion earlier this month, Meta is currently testing the function to schedule posts and Instagram Reels with a tool inside the app, which would be a significant boost to the platform’s content programming capabilities,” said Zarnaz Arlia, chief marketing officer at Facebook and Instagram marketing partner Emplifi.

At Meta’s most recent earnings call Zuckerberg aimed to temper investor fears by stating that in coming years, the firm will “pace” Reality Labs investments, to facilitate company-wide growth and boost operating income. Its stated strategy is to dedicate a set portion of profits from its ‘Family of Apps’ - Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram - towards Reality Labs and other R&D ventures, whilst retaining enough for healthy shareholder returns.

It’s hard to think of a word more associated with metaverse tech right now than 'faith'. Even the most bullish of investors and ardent supporters of the prospect of web3 will likely raise eyebrows at these results and start engaging with the long-held criticism of metaverse tech. Being asked to place trust in a concept that still hasn’t sparked the Zuck-promised tech revolution, and is the butt of jokes by many in the tech community, could prove too much for investors in the coming year.

Meta has been ordered to sell the social media GIF library Giphy, following a long investigation of the tech giant’s purchase.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ruled that the deal would lead to a 'substantial lessening of competition' in social media services in the UK and internationally, as well as drop in display advertising in the UK due to a loss of competitive innovation.

The CMA has now concluded that Giphy must be sold off to an approved buyer.

According to an independent panel studying the evidence, the deal gave Meta excessive power over the market, as it was able to deny access to Giphy GIFs to rival social media platforms. Concerns were also raised over the potential for Meta to require firms that use Giphy, such as Twitter or TikTok, to sign new terms of access that could give Meta more UK user data.

Another market that the CMA ruled Meta’s acquisition would negatively impact is the display advertising market. It stated that prior to the deal, Giphy was engaged in a number of advertising services throughout the US based around GIFs, and there was potential for expansion into countries such as the UK. Meta ended these services upon completion of the acquisition.

Meta’s share of the £7 billion advertising market in the UK, equivalent to almost half, was cited as context, and as a point of concern. It also ruled that had Giphy continued to operate these services, it may have done so in competition with Meta and other companies, leading to positive change driven by competition, which the market now lacks.

Last year, the CMA raised concerns over the 2020 acquisition of Giphy by Meta, then Facebook, for $400 million. After the first round of an investigation, the watchdog released a report in August 2021 stating that the move had negatively impacted competition between social media platforms.

Following a phase 2 decision by the CMA in November 2021, which ordered Meta to sell Giphy due to the harm that it could cause users and advertisers, Meta appealed the decision. However, in July the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) upheld the CMA’s ruling, and today’s decision is described as ‘final’.

“This deal would significantly reduce competition in 2 markets,” stated Stuart McIntosh, chair of the independent inquiry group tasked with the investigation.

“It has already resulted in the removal of a potential challenger in the UK display ad market, while also giving Meta the ability to further increase its substantial market power in social media. The only way this can be addressed is by the sale of Giphy. This will promote innovation in digital advertising, and also ensure UK social media users continue to benefit from access to Giphy.”

IT Pro has approached Meta for a statement.

Meta will send educational alerts to nearly 1 million users that it believes may have been impacted in a potential data breach after using a catalogue of mobile apps identified as malicious.

The parent company of Facebook discovered more than 400 apps on Android and iOS were specifically crafted to steal account credentials and is working with Google and Apple to help secure impacted accounts.

Meta's security researchers enumerated signals from its telemetry to decide which users would receive the notifications. These users may have used one of the 403 malicious apps, but it's thought that fewer than the total are actually compromised.

Notified users will be directed to a new dedicated help desk article that will guide them through why they've been notified and how to secure their accounts.

The company will not detail how it was able to identify which users may have been impacted by the malicious apps through fear of alerting threat actors to its security research methods.

The apps used by cyber criminals to steal account data were mostly on Android’s Google Play store. A total of 356 of the identified apps were Android-based compared to just 47 on Apple’s App Store.

Android apps are typically more vulnerable to these kinds of attacks since smartphones running the operating system are permitted to download apps from unverified third-party app stores.

Users can be tricked into visiting links leading to malicious app stores where malware-laden apps can be downloaded and installed, executing myriad attacker-designated tasks such as password stealing.

Apple’s iPhones can only download apps from the Apple-controlled App Store which verifies the legitimacy of each one.

Generally speaking, this leads to a comparatively small number of cases involving mobile malware affecting Apple’s hardware, but the recent incident with Meta highlights how some entries can slip through security controls.

Meta said all of the apps involved were available on third-party app stores but also said they were listed on the official stores of Apple and Google, too.

The malicious apps took various disguises but the most common theme was fake photo-editing apps, comprising more than 42% of the total number.

The vast majority of apps impacting iOS users appeared to be focused on business-related functions such as Facebook advert managers and analytics.

“This is a highly adversarial space and while our industry peers work to detect and remove malicious software, some of these apps evade detection and make it onto legitimate app stores,” said Meta in a blog post.

“We’ve reported these malicious apps to our peers at Apple and Google and they have been taken down from both app stores prior to this report’s publication.

“We are also alerting people who may have unknowingly self-compromised their accounts by downloading these apps and sharing their credentials, and are helping them to secure their accounts.”

Meta said these apps typically claim to offer either a fun or useful service and greet users with a ‘Login with Facebook’ option at launch.

Choosing this option will lead the user to input their real Facebook account credentials which would then be stolen by the app and relayed to the cyber criminals behind it.

Many of the apps identified by the company were only accessible after logging in using the social media platform - a telltale sign of a fraudulent campaign, it said.

It’s especially threatening to businesses that rely on social media for key operations like marketing or advertising.

The case with iOS apps mainly targeting advert and analytics managers for Facebook pages is indicative of the attackers’ motives - trying to target users that definitely have business accounts.

Examining the number and quality of reviews an app hs will usually indicate if it is trustworthy or not, but Meta said it’s common for such apps to generate fake reviews to increase the perception of authenticity.

Companies operating Facebook Business or Ad accounts have been warned of a new info stealing campaign in which threat actors seize access privileges to such accounts for profit.

The operation begins with threat actors scouting LinkedIn for individuals within companies who have high-level access to a Facebook Business account. Targets are then the subject of phishing in order to steal their login credentials.

Once access to the business account has been acquired, the threat actors alter payment information, invoices, credit card details and transactions for their own profit.

Researchers at WithSecure discovered the ongoing campaign, which they dubbed ‘DUCKTAIL’ in a publication on the campaign released today They believe it has been operational since late 2021, and have found evidence to suggest that the threat actors are based in Vietnam.

Those in roles such as managerial, digital media, marketing or human resources are particularly targeted and typically sent a link to an archive file on a cloud-hosting site under a false pretence. This contains the malware executable, along with several files named after brand keywords.

Activated, the malware is tailor-made to extract Facebook session cookies from the browsers of its victims, along with security credentials obtained through the initial session cookie.

After personal information has been stolen from the victim, the malware steals sensitive information from all business and advert accounts associated with the victim’s personal account. It also attempts to grant administrator or finance editor roles to email addresses used by the threat actors.

Once granted, Facebook considers the threat actors legitimate administrators, and they can access all accounts, tools and settings associated with the business as well as remove the business manager. Stolen data is exfiltrated through Telegram to the DUCKTAIL command and control (C2) channel.

Extracting the user agent of the victim’s browser allows the threat actors to make requests to Facebook endpoints, thereby making requests appear as if they are coming from the victim’s browser.

It is theorised by WithSecure that this circumvents Meta security features that might otherwise identify the activity as malicious. Moreover, the malware’s ability to steal access tokens, two-factor authentication codes and the victim’s IP address, among other information, gives threat actors the ability to do this masked attack from external machines.

"Many spear phishing campaigns target users on LinkedIn,” stated WithSecure researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad.

"If you are in a role that has admin access to corporate social media accounts, it is important to exercise caution when interacting with others on social media platforms, especially when dealing with attachments or links sent from individuals you are unfamiliar with.

"Realistically, if the threat actor manages to obtain Admin access to a victim’s Facebook Business account, the sky’s the limit in terms of what they can do. With admin access, the threat actor has full control over the business. They can view and modify settings, people, account, and tools linked to the business as well as outright delete the business."

Facebook Business admins have been urged to regularly review the privileges of users within their account, and revoke access for any unknown users with the role of finance editor or administrator.

This article has been updated to include an expanded quote from Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad.

Meta has doubled down on its inclusion of tracking parameters in URLs posted to Facebook, by encrypting URLs to include parameters within required portions of the address itself.

When a user clicks a link shared through Facebook, all kinds of parameters are added to the URL. Some of these, such as utm_source and utm_medium are used by analytics sites such as Google Analytics to measure where traffic is coming from, and how much of it there is.

Facebook has historically used the parameter fbclid to measure what sites its users visit and which links they click, whether or not those sites support Facebook’s tracking script Meta Pixel. These are then used to tailor users’ ad profiles, to target them more effectively.

URLs under the new system lack clearly defined parameter names, appearing instead as a long string of letters and numbers in which all the address and tracking information is included in an encrypted format.

It is normally possible to strip certain parameters from URLs, removing the tracking element and increasing link privacy. Some browsers even offer URL stripping as a built-in choice, for privacy-minded users.

These include Firefox, which last month introduced a feature called ‘Query Parameter Stripping’ that automatically removes tracking parameters from URLs to improve the privacy profile of its users. This can be activated in the browser's configuration settings. The browser Brave also supports a URL stripping feature. With its move to encrypt the URL parameters, Meta has greatly impacted the ability of such tools to effectively strip the tracking elements.

In binding tracking elements with the URLs in such a way that it is impossible to tell where the web address ends and the parameters begin, Meta has found a way to track data for advertising almost unavoidably. This is a boost for its analytics operation, as well as for the tech giant's advertising partners whose interests include targeted data on as many users as possible.

With 153 million users, Firefox represents a not insignificant pool of users to Meta, which enjoyed just under $115 billion in revenue last year largely through advertising.

It Pro has reached out to Meta for comment.

Ireland’s data protection regulator has pushed to stop Meta’s from moving personal data from Europe Union (EU) territories to the US.

An Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) draft decision has been sent to counterparts in Europe, with suggestions it could lead to blocking Meta from sending user data from the continent to the US, as reported by Politico yesterday.

Meta has warned that this kind of decision would shut down many of its services in Europe, including Instagram and Facebook.If approved by other European national data protection regulators, the order to block these services may affect other businesses which have been unsure how to continue sending data between Europe and the US.

In 2020, the European Court of Justice annulled the Privacy Shield agreement due to concerns around US surveillance practices. In the ruling, the court also made it harder to use standard contractual clauses (SCCs) which are legal tools that allowed Meta and other US firms to transfer personal data to their home country. The new order from Ireland will mean that Meta will have to stop relying on SCCs as well.

The DPC's draft decision has arrived amid the EU and US attempting to negotiate a new data-transfer mechanism, which would allow businesses like Meta to continue transferring data from Europe to the US. The two entities agreed to a preliminary deal in March, but negotiations have stalled and a final deal isn't expected be reached before the end of the year.

The draft decision has been sent to other European privacy regulators, which will now have a month to submit their input, a spokesperson from the Irish DPC told Politico.

“This draft decision, which is subject to review by European Data Protection Authorities, relates to a conflict of EU and US law which is in the process of being resolved,” a Meta spokesperson told IT Pro. “We welcome the EU-US agreement for a new legal framework that will allow the continued transfer of data across borders, and we expect this framework will allow us to keep families, communities and economies connected.”

The regulator’s draft decision comes after Meta’s attempt to transfer large amounts of data to the US following years of battles between the tech giant and European privacy advocates.

"If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe," Meta said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in March this year.

This isn’t the first time that Ireland’s DPC and Meta have clashed. In March 2022, the regulator hit the company with a €17 million (£14 million) fine over multiple breaches of GDPR. It said it arrived at this decision following an inquiry into a series of 12 data breach notifications it received between 7 June 2018 and 4 December 2018.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has hit Meta with a €17 million (£14 million) fine over multiple breaches of GDPR.

The DPC said the decision followed an inquiry into a series of 12 data breach notifications it received between 7 June 2018 and 4 December 2018. The inquiry looked at the extent to which Meta complied with the requirements of GDPR Articles 5(1)(f), 5(2), 24(1) and 32(1) in relation to the processing of personal data relevant to the 12 breach notifications.

Following the inquiry, the DPC found that Meta infringed Articles 5(2) and 24(1) GDPR. It found the company failed to have in place appropriate technical and organisational measures which would enable it to readily demonstrate the security measures that it implemented in practice to protect EU users’ data, in the context of the 12 data breaches.

Since the processing under examination constituted “cross-border” processing, the DPC said its decision was subject to the co-decision making process outlined in Article 60 GDPR and all of the other European supervisory authorities were engaged as co-decision-makers.

The Irish data regulator has been accused in the past of being the “bottleneck” of GDPR enforcement with 160 unresolved complaints. Campaigners claimed that it was hindering pan-European data protection enforcement as a result, with 98% of 164 cases remaining unresolved.

“While objections to the DPC’s draft decision were raised by two of the European supervisory authorities, consensus was achieved through further engagement between the DPC and the supervisory authorities concerned,” stated the DPC. “Accordingly, the DPC’s decision represents the collective views of both the DPC and its counterpart supervisory authorities throughout the EU.”

A Meta spokesperson told IT Pro: “This fine is about record-keeping practices from 2018 that we have since updated, not a failure to protect people's information. We take our obligations under the GDPR seriously, and will carefully consider this decision as our processes continue to evolve.”

To put the €17 million fine into perspective, Facebook’s main Irish subsidiary paid an additional €35 million to settle outstanding tax matters in 2020, and the company put over €1 billion aside to cover potential fines from regulatory investigations, according to the Irish Times. Its corporate tax liability rose to €266.3 million from €173.2 million. Its revenue jumped by €6.3 billion to €40.6 billion at Facebook Ireland in 2020, while pre-tax profits rose to €890 million compared to €482 million the previous year.

The amount the company set aside for potential administrative fines from investigations conducted by data protection authorities more than tripled from €302.3 million to €1.02 billion. The company predicted that regulatory matters would be resolved within the next two years.

Meta has said that privacy changes made by Apple to iOS will end up costing the company $10 billion in 2022.

The parent company for Facebook reported mixed Q4 results on Wednesday, with a lower than expected outlook for the first quarter of the year.

Its chief financial officer (CFO) David Wehner said on an earnings call on Wednesday that the social media giant expects its growth to be "negatively impacted" by multiple factors, including supply chain disruptions and cost inflations hitting its advertisers budgets. However, the most significant fear expressed by the CFO was financial "headwinds" resulting from Apple's iOS changes.

Meta and Apple's privacy dispute

Apple's iOS 14.5 update, which was released in April last year, included an App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature which is designed to limit the amount of user data app-makers can harvest and sell to advertisers. App developers now need to get explicit permission from users if they want to track their activity across other apps and websites when using iPhones or iPads.

Meta has previously hit out at the decision and, on its earring call, Wehner explained that the company had already seen revenue fall in Q4 as a direct result. He added that this was "in-line" with its expectations, but was going to be a problem for the foreseeable future.

"As we go into 2022, we're going to be lapping a period in which in Q1 and Q2, those headwinds were not in place in the year-ago period," Wehner said on the call. "So that definitely makes for a tough comp in the first half of the year. And we believe the impact of iOS overall as a headwind on our business in 2022 is on the order of $10 billion, so it's a pretty significant headwind for our business. And we're seeing that impact in a number of verticals."

Wehner also added that it was "quite notable" that Google's Q4 results showed positive growth in the same areas. He suggested the company "faces a different set of restrictions from Apple" because of the amount of money Google pays to remain the default search engine on iOS devices.

"We believe those restrictions from Apple are designed in a way to carve out browsers from the tracking Apple requires for app," Wehner said. "So what that means is that search ads could have access to far more third party data, for measurement and optimisation purposes, than app-based ad platforms like ours."

"Given that Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search, the incentive clearly is for this policy discrepancy to continue."

Google and Facebook have been hit with a combined fine of €210 million (£175 million) over failures in policies that allow users to accept and refuse cookies on their websites.

France's National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties regulator (CNIL) fined Google €150 million euros, €90 million for Google LLC and €60 million for Google Ireland Limited, while Facebook Ireland Limited was given a fine of €60 million.

CNIL said that the websites facebook.com, google.fr, and youtube.com have all failed to provide an easy way for users to reject cookie collection on their browsers, and that several clicks are required to refuse all cookies, compared with a single click to provide consent.

The regulator argued the fact users are unable to refuse cookies as easily as they can accept them influences their choice in favour of consent, constituting an infringement of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act.

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, head of France's National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL), speaking at CNIL's headquarters in Paris

The penalties also order the companies to provide internet users in France with a means of refusing cookies that is at least as simple as the existing mechanism for accepting them, within a three month period. If they fail to do so, the companies will have to pay a penalty of €100,000 per day of delay.

"We are reviewing the authority's decision and remain committed to working with relevant authorities,” a spokesperson from Meta told IT Pro. “Our cookie consent controls provide people with greater control over their data, including a new settings menu on Facebook and Instagram where people can revisit and manage their decisions at any time, and we continue to develop and improve these controls.”

A Google spokesperson said: “People trust us to respect their right to privacy and keep them safe. We understand our responsibility to protect that trust and are committing to further changes and active work with the CNIL in light of this decision under the ePrivacy Directive."

This isn’t the first time that CNIL has targeted big tech companies over their use of cookies. In December 2020, Amazon and Google were fined £122 million collectively for “insufficient” cookie consent. Google was hit with a €100 million (£90 million) fine while Amazon received one for €35 million (£32 million).

According to the investigation, Google didn’t provide enough information to users in France about why and how cookies are used, whereas Amazon was fined for placing cookies on people’s computers without their consent.

Google challenged this fine at the Council of State in February 2021, according to Euractiv. Politico reported that Google is still fighting this case, and a source said the company is likely to oppose the new fines and go to the French top court again.

Meta will start forcing its most-targeted users to use two-factor authentication as part of an expansion to its Facebook Protect program.

The expansion will also see the company roll out the program in more countries, reaching over 50 by the end of the year, including India and Portugal.

The company launched its Protect program in 2018 to introduce more security controls, including monitoring for potential hacking threats. It expanded the initiative ahead of the 2020 US election.

The company had already announced that it was introducing 2FA in 2011. Of the 1.5 million accounts that registered with the Facebook Protect program, 950,000 use the 2FA option, it said.

"However, this important feature has been historically underutilized across the internet — even by people that are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as journalists, activists, political candidates and others," it added.

Requiring that these groups use the 2FA feature will help to protect highly targeted people, the company said.

Meta will prompt accounts deemed high-risk to enrol in the Protect initiative. People who believe they fit this description can also apply to be enrolled through their organizations.

The company will also work to simplify the process in the coming months, it added, making enrolment easier and improving customer support for the feature. It has already been testing these measures, and said that it improved adoption rates to over 90% among targeted groups.

In October, following testimony about its internal policies by whistleblower Frances Haugen, the company expanded its harassment policy to protect public figures. It banned content that degraded or sexualized public figures, reflecting existing policies that applied to private individuals.

It also added more protections for journalists and human rights activists, and banned coordinated harassment in which groups of people work together to target individual users.

Meta has announced plans to delay the global rollout of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) across its messaging applications to 2023.

The company previously said it would have E2EE across all its products by 2022 at the earliest.

Meta said it would be taking additional time to ensure the implementation across Facebook Messenger and Instagram is done correctly, protecting privacy while also mitigating the risk of online harms.

WhatsApp is currently the only app in Meta's product portfolio that enables E2EE by default, although it has previously been criticised for allowing moderators to access the contents of any messages flagged by users as potentially abusive.

“We’re taking our time to get this right and we don’t plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023,” said Antigone Davis, head of safety at Meta, the Sunday Telegraph.

“As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we’re determined to protect people’s private communications and keep people safe online,” she added.

E2EE has created an ongoing debate around the divide between privacy and personal safety. Meta said it's taking time to implement E2EE in a way that upholds both, but how that happens is unclear.

If E2EE is deployed in its proper form, with unique on-device encryption, it should be impossible to facilitate any third-party oversight of what is communicated through the technology without breaking its fundamental principles.

"Encryption is an absolute. You either have it or you don’t. There is no 'getting it right'," said Andy Yen, founder and CEO at Proton. "The best way to protect privacy and user data is to not have the data in the first place.

"Of course we need to ensure tech is not misused, but there are many ways to combat criminal behaviour," he added. "Back doors and similar methods of undermining privacy are an ineffective way of preventing crime. If Meta cared as much about user privacy as it claims, it would have implemented end to end encryption a long time ago."

From a cyber security perspective, Jim Killock, executive director at Open Rights Group, said there is a clear argument that E2EE offers protections for the everyday consumer and calls for its removal would be welcomed by cyber criminals all over.

"There are many ways of tackling crime. Storing all communications in the clear is just one; the focus on E2EE is narrow and misleading," he told IT Pro. "What is certain is that E2EE provides security from cybercriminals and hacking.

"Government campaigning against security technologies is a gift to cybercriminals," he added.

However, repeated calls for a proposed 'backdoor' in E2EE-enabled messaging services have been made by governments across the world.

The main opposing arguments are those related to the protection of children online and safeguarding national security from terror events, for example.

Home Secretary Priti Patel labelled Facebook's encryption plans "simply not acceptable" earlier this year at an event run by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). Patel said tech companies have a duty to protect children from online harms.

"Facebook is right not to proceed with end-to-end encryption until it has a proper plan to prevent child abuse going undetected on its platforms," said Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC, to the Guardian.

"But they should only go ahead with these measures when they can demonstrate they have the technology in place that will ensure children will be at no greater risk of abuse," he added.

Coinciding with Meta's new 2023 encryption deadline is the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Bill, which will force online platforms to implement protections for users, including children, from harm and address abusive content.

The domestic legislation may stifle Meta's ability to enable E2EE across its products, but to what extent the Online Safety Bill will impede consumer privacy through encrypted messaging remains to be seen.

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Can the US take on big tech?’. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.

Adam Shepherd

Hello, and welcome to the IT Pro Podcast. I'm Adam Shepherd.

Justin Cupler

I'm Justin Cupler.

Zach Marzouk

And I'm Zach Marzouk.

Adam

And today we're playing Monopoly. Now, if you've been paying attention to the intersection of technology and politics over the last year or so, you'll probably have noticed a growing trend of lawmakers railing against big tech companies. This has been particularly pronounced in the US where a number of bills have been launched, with the aim of breaking up the supposed monopolies held by giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon.

Zach

This week, we're taking a look at these proposed laws examining the corporate practices they take issue with and why these practices have arisen in the first place, as well as the potential impact that these bills could have on America's status as an innovation centre.

Adam

So, guys, before we dig into this topic in earnest, let's just start off with a little bit of a chat about what the kind of main issue is with these anti monopoly bills. Why are there so many of them just now?

Justin

I think we're coming off an administration with a lot of turmoil with big tech. I think that's number one. That side of the political parties is charged up right now to take them on. But there's also a collection of the other side that's been charged up for a long term to take on certain parts of it. Section 230 has been a big, big target of them. And it's kind of rolled off the back of that. And then you added all these mergers that have been popping up, that are happening at at a feverish pace lately. I think that's why we're starting to see them consider these antimonopoly bills and push harder on them.

Zach

Yeah, I think with the obvious growth of the internet in the last decade or so, it means that big tech companies' power has grown incredibly, not only in the US, but also across the the world. And I think legislators are now beginning to wake up and realise that they really need to maybe introduced some form of regulation to crack down on their power.

Adam

Yeah, and I think it's worth noting as well, that there are a huge amount of anti monopoly bills and anti monopoly arguments that have emerged over the last couple of years. But they're spread across a pretty diverse set of opinions, you know, they're not all targeting the same kind of problems and talking points. There's actually a huge range of complaints that have been levelled at big tech in this kind of same area. So let's take a look at some of the specific bills that have been launched. Zack, you've been doing a lot of research into this recently. What are the kind of the main ones that are currently looking to gain traction on the floor?

Zach

Okay, so in Biden's executive order that was signed earlier in the year, he wanted to promote competition in the country, and basically focus on areas in which big tech firms are undermining competition and reducing innovation. So this included policies like a greater scrutiny of mergers, encouraging the FTC to establish rules on surveillance and accumulation of data and rules barring unfair methods of competition on internet marketplaces. And then linked to that he also wants to make it easier and cheaper to repair items consumers own. So essentially a right to repair.

Adam

Well, it's something we've heard a lot about over the last couple of years, particularly around things like planned obsolescence.

Zach

Yeah, I think the only tech company who is investigating right to repair right now is Microsoft. And that's only because they were activists, activist investors, who last month pressured the company to start in the midst of an investigation into right to repair. In June, there were five other bills in the House of Representatives that were discussed. So the first bill is called the American Innovation and Choice Online Act which seeks to prohibit discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms, including a ban on self preferencing. There's a second one called the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, which prohibits acquisitions of competitive threats by dominant platforms, as well as those that expand or entrench the market power of the platforms. The third bill is the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, which looks to eliminate the ability of dominant platforms to leverage their control across multiple business lines to self preference and disadvantage competitors. The fourth bill is called Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching, which essentially brings in new data portability requirements to try and promote competition by lowering barriers to entry and switching costs for businesses and consumers. The fifth bill is called the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act; it updates filing fees for mergers for the first time in two decades, I think that one's slightly more of like an administration, or like bureaucratic bill.

Adam

And that data portability bill in particular, is something that a lot of people have been paying attention to in a business context. One of the big fears in business IT is this concept of vendor lock in where you know, once you've moved to a service, it can often be very, very difficult to actually get your data out and bring it over to a new service, I'm sure all of us will be familiar on the consumer side with how difficult it is to take your mobile number, for example, from one network to another. And, you know, when you're dealing with a business estate that has maybe terabytes or petabytes, even, of data that you want to take from one, say, cloud storage provider to another, that kind of frustration is just orders of magnitude greater. So we've also seen bills, looking at digital storefronts and the app economy, right?

Zach

Yeah, that was introduced in August. It's called the Open App Markets Act. It declares that Google and Apple have gatekeeper control of the two dominant mobile operating systems as their app stores allow them to exclusively dictate the terms of the app market. So it's looking to break that up.

Adam

Yeah, it's a particularly thorny question, because I'm not sure if anyone has ever tried to use any of the alternative app stores out there. Because there are, there are other app stores that you can use, they usually involve sideloading applications onto your phone through slightly, not dodgy, but by means that are not recommended, let's say. And Amazon operates its own app store, for example. Microsoft operates obviously a separate UWP app store for Windows. But the apps that find their way onto there generally are not good. The selections are usually very, very limited. The quality control is nowhere near as good, as you know, even the Google Play Store, which I think says a lot for anyone that's dived into the bowels of the Play store before. And it does sort of beg the question, Are these two platforms dominant because they're kind of keeping a stranglehold on competition? Or are they dominant because they're just the best options?

Justin

Yeah, I think one of the problems they're gonna have with this is the the consumer demand for more app stores. I mean, I like you said, I've never heard of any other episodes, except for Amazon App Store, and Microsoft. Nor will I go to any others because I just don't trust them. So is there a company out there willing to dive into this and take advantage of this anti monopoly bill? Or are they just spinning their wheels trying to nail Google and nail Apple or whatever?

Zach

So yeah, the last two bills that were proposed, were in October. And they would essentially bar big tech platforms from favouring their own products and services. That's the first one. And then the second bill, was what Justin was talking about, which would basically remove some of the protections given to tech companies by something called Section 230, which is a portion of the Communications Decency Act that exempts them from liability for what is posted on their platforms. All the bills that are being proposed are a result of cross party efforts. So it's both Democrats and Republicans working together to introduce them.

Adam

So what do we think about these bills, then? They're fairly wide ranging, I think it's fair to say. And as Zack mentioned, they kind of broadly, they have broad kind of bipartisan appeal. But do we think that these are kind of legitimate issues that are being brought up?

Justin

I think the the most legitimate one I see on here, the one that has the most grounds to stand on is the limiting of mergers and acquisitions. Because now you have startups that are literally starting up just for the plain goal of being acquired by one of the big giants. And these giants are gobbling them up, changing the name, putting it under their umbrella and running with it. And that that is limiting a lot of innovation. It's limiting people who legitimately want to get a start running, want to run this as an actual startup that's going to be successful. It's limiting those people's ability to do this in lieu of the people who want to go out there and just sell their startup for a billion dollars.

Adam

So looking at mergers and acquisitions landscape, one of the problems or supposed problems that that one of these bills is trying to address is the practice of essentially catch and kill. So big tech companies buying startups that they see as a potential threat, and essentially just subsuming them into, into their kind of existing corporate structure, you know, largely when they're doing something that whichever company it is, is already doing. But is this a problem? I mean, this has been going on really for, you know, as long as, as business acquisitions have been a thing, what is it about big tech's use of this tactic in particular that lawmakers are finding so objectionable, do we think?

Justin

I would say the thing they're seeing the most is the, for example, the ultimate dominance of Google. Now they see this all, I mean, they are the end all be all of tech right now, everything you touch every day, has something to do with Google. And that is through acquisitions, mergers, buying companies, buying, and all of this. And that's where this all came from. And everyone kind of followed suit with them, then them and I believe Microsoft is also one of those ones, that's gobbling up things left and right. And now all the other tech companies below them are doing this exact same thing. So we're seeing this trend; for Google, it was Okay, it's convenient, it was easy for all of us, because we had all these services packaged into one nice tidy package. Now it's getting to a point where everything is going that direction, and it's becoming a problem.

Adam

And you mentioned Microsoft there, I think it's important to highlight that this, or certain elements of this, at least, aren't exactly new, particularly in terms of the self preferential stuff. Of course, Microsoft famously, back in the, back in the 90s, was the subject of a massive antitrust case for effectively killing Netscape by putting Internet Explorer as the default web browser option on Windows, which gave it a huge market share, got a load of people used to using Internet Explorer, and basically, for a long time completely stifled the browser market. So this isn't new, per se. But one of the really interesting things about the the self preferential argument is, I think you could make an argument that it is reasonable for companies to promote their own services and their own products. And it's not something that's unique to tech; when you go to the grocery store, for example, you will quite often see prominently featured, that store's own-brand products, you know, they will be promoted heavily, they will often be discounted or sold under special offers. And that isn't really that much different compared to some of the tactics that tech giants are using to promote their own services - in some cases.

Zach

I think the comparison there would be that there would only be one supermarket in the country. And I think that's the comparison we can make with something like Google.

Justin

But to play devil's advocate on that on that is the fact that there, again comes into simplicity for us as the end user, when they give preferential treatment to these these different softwares and hardwares and things like that. It's because they Yes, it's their their service and their hardware, but it's also easier for them to develop it in house and make it work the right way. When they have to go out and suddely spread out to other places, and then link up with other systems and deal with them. You can run into some issues, there are some you know, there's some software's out there to integrate things like Zapier and things like that, but they don't exactly do, they don't function the way it's supposed to function if it's actually put together and given that preferential treatment.

Adam

Yeah, and I think the existence of platforms like Zapier, and If This Then That, and all of these kind of framework based services really illustrates that point, you know, the fact that we need third party services, to to form the kind of the links between all these services that we're using, illustrates how difficult it is to get these systems to talk to each other. And considering that we, in a lot of cases, need these systems to talk to each other in order to do the things that we need to do, not just on a consumer level, but especially for businesses, it does sort of raise the question, Is it reasonable to kind of make that trade off and say, okay, you know, maybe this makes it a little bit harder for newer competitors to break into the market, but It's also providing an arguably essential service.

Zach

I think there have been some voices in the industry as well who have raised concerns around this bill, the self preferencing one. Essentially, they're asking, Will it ban Google from showing YouTube videos in its results?

Adam

Yeah, and I think with tech in particular, we've reached a point now, where so many systems, particularly the systems that we've already talked about, you know, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple to certain extents, they're all networked so tightly together, that splitting them up would be incredibly difficult, if not actively impossible. I mean, like, the Facebook outage that we had a couple of months ago, is a prime example of that. The reason that that took as long to fix as it did, is because Facebook has deliberately architected itself in such a way that all of its systems are completely interdependent. And effectively, you can't split it up because WhatsApp's backend infrastructure and back end tooling runs on top of Facebook's platform; it runs on top of Facebook's kind of domain, and unpicking all of that and separating out those services may not even be possible without effectively burning it to the ground and starting again, from scratch. I would imagine Google and Microsoft are both similar in terms of how their systems talk to each other, because that's the most straightforward way to design systems in a lot of cases, you know, you link what you already have together. Facebook, presumably, has also done it with half an eye on making sure that it doesn't get split up at some point, because Facebook in particular has been fielding these particular monopoly questions for a number of years now. But it also just makes good engineering sense. So on that note, then, is it possible to address the kind of concerns that we've already spoken about with regulation? You know, how many of these problems can be legislated for?

Zach

Yeah, I think this is a really good question, you can definitely bring in regulation to curb the power of big tech, but I don't know if it will go far enough, especially since the bills are still being discussed. So we don't know what the end, the final bill would look like. I think if you look at China, and see what they've done in terms of regulation, which is probably like the other end of the scale, the spectrum, compared to the US, they're definitely taking a stance against big tech, you know, they're curtailing the power of tech giants, you know, firing CEOs and so on. But I don't know if the US is going to go all the way and bring in the right legislation that will address the power of big tech.

Adam

So let's dig into that quickly. What kind of measures is China taking at the moment against these kinds of monopolies? Because they're being pretty drastic, right?

Zach

Yeah. So right now China is curtailing the power of their technology platforms. So you may have seen Jack Ma, the Alibaba CEO, he appeared to disappear, if you like, for a while and has now only just resurfaced in Europe. So we're not sure what's going on there. But another CEO stepped down recently, I think, the CEO of TikTok and then before that, the CFO of Bytedance stepped down to focus on TikTok, so I think there's definitely some kind of shift going on there. China brought in a new data law recently. So in China, right now, if you're a tech platform, you're 100% responsible for any content that's published there. Which means that for many companies, social media companies from the West, that is a huge problem, because they don't really mind what's posted on their platforms. Whereas in China, you have to ensure you're following the cyberspace agency's policies, otherwise, you could end up with some kind of penalty or fine, which includes a financial penalty or also a penalty for people who work with data in your business, or even those people at the top. Whereas in the US, you don't really see that happening. I don't think the regulation is going to address that in any way.

Adam

And no. and China, of course, is is famous for being, shall we say, fairly heavy handed with its approach to corporate regulation in particular. And its kind of adherence to, to policy guidelines.

Zach

Microsoft shut down LinkedIn in China the other week, which is related to its online laws. So LinkedIn was one of the last Western social media platforms available in China. And it decided to shut it down in and it's going to introduce a new kind of like job board portal, but without the social media aspect.

Adam

Which is, I think, quite interesting in terms of how companies are kind of approaching compliance in China. But moving things back to the US. Do we think that these proposed regulations are actually capable of solving the challenges that they set out to? Or are these issues simply too big to be tackled with, you know, new laws?

Justin

I think when you come to the preferential treatment, the preference they give their own apps, and their own hardware and so forth, I think that is at this point, it's almost beyond repair. I mean, if you think about it, that would involve taking the the massive being that is Google and trying to break it up into small pieces. How many of Congress's bills are stored on Google Drive right now? Who knows. So breaking that up, is gonna that's gonna be a bear in itself, that's gonna affect everybody. We work in Google Drive, everybody works in Google Drive, they're all linked to different things. And that's all linked to your email, which is all linked to your Slack. And you're gonna blow this up, that's that's probably not going to happen. Will it be some regulation, moving forward, forward looking stuff, I think there will be forward looking regulation. But I do not think it's going to be retroactive, I believe what's going to happen is if they introduce these, it's going to be you're grandfathered in. But don't do it again. As for things like the mergers and acquisitions, I think that again, is going to be the one that they're gonna be able to make the biggest moves on. Because that, again, is a problem. It's a major problem. It's killing innovation in this country, that the big dogs are coming in, as you say, catch and kill, grab these companies that are their potential rivals, and kill them, absorb their technology and move forward. And we see in the automotive space, also these these companies, larger companies, gobbling up battery companies for EVs, absorbing them and spitting them out, and they no longer exist, they just take the batteries and run with them. So I think that's what we're gonna see across the board, tech, automotive, everyone's gonna have that issue. And then the rest of these, it's really hard to say, because they do have, you do have cross platform or cross cross the aisle support. But is there enough cross the aisle support between all of them to get the votes needed to push them through? That remains to be seen that that's really hard to say, because big tech has a lot of reach in politics, they really do. So will they be able to get enough people on board to say, rewrite section 230, that's been on the table for five years. And still, nothing has happened, no one has come forward with any kind of regulation that could possibly replace it or even tweak it a little bit in the past five years, they haven't been able to, they've been pushing so hard on it. So those ones I doubt will; with the two I mentioned, I think moving forward with with the preferential treatments and the overall scope of the mergers and acquisitions, I think those two are the most most most likely to be pushed forward.

Adam

So do we think that there is a possible future where we see Congress stepping in and breaking up some of the bigger tech players, you know, Google, Facebook, Microsoft? Do we think we'll, we could feasibly see some of those divisions hived off into their own companies in the same way that we saw in the UK with the BT Openreach split a couple of years ago?

Justin

We had something similar to that with, I believe it was Bell South. When it came to telephone long distance providers, they had to break up I believe it was into three or four different companies. But there's a big difference. People always point to that one; there's a huge difference. Back then you're talking about physical stuff, you're talking about physical offices, physical lines, physical subscribers, and now you're talking about data and servers and things like, things that are virtual that you now have to divide up. That's that's a whole other undertaking that I'm not sure if Congress has the ability to dive into and really figure out how to do this because they're gonna have to write the regulations to how they will divide this stuff. When you're splitting a line, that's easy, you say, okay,Bell South, you get this line, this telephone company or this new telephone company, gets that line, Verizon, you get that line. But when it comes to this digital stuff, how are you going to break this apart? It's almost impossible.

Zach

One thing we should mention is that the bills are still being discussed. I think they were meant to be put to the floor in October. But it's a little bit peculiar that the legislators are still discussing the bill, which gives me the feeling that they're not quite sure what to do. If you cast your mind back to when Zuckerberg appeared in front of a committee, and you had senators asking fairly strange questions to him. It could be linked to that. I hope it isn't. But it's something to bear in mind.

Adam

Yeah, it's it's the problem that every every effort to regulate the tech industry faces. These regulations are being formulated and dicussed by people who, bless their hearts, just do not fundamentally understand the technologies or the industries that they are dealing with, you know, because they are very complicated, it's a very complicated field, there is a lot of very complex kind of interactions, not even just on on the technical side, but just in terms of the relationships that these companies have to each other, to their customers, to the public, to the wider kind of internet infrastructure. But legislators, generally speaking, don't have the best grasp of that kind of stuff. So it's hard for, it's hard for anyone to try and sort out a problem that they don't understand, which I think is where a lot of frustrations, particularly for people in the industry, come into this. So let's say for a moment that these bills all do go through in more or less the same form that they're currently being discussed. If the bills go through in their current state, what does this do to the business climate in the US? Does this put a damper on innovation? Will it drive companies in the tech sector elsewhere? Or will it kind of have the intended effect in terms of accelerating innovation, providing a more competitive marketplace, you know, all of the silver lining type stuff?

Justin

I think one thing you said, Adam, that that's a good point to bring up, that's probably going to be the biggest benefactor from this are going to be the third party apps, the third party integration apps, and the third party integration, softwares that bring these together, like the Zapiers and so forth. I think that's where we're going to see the biggest innovation if they have to break all these up, because now someone has to come in and put these pieces back together. And these companies are already tuned to doing that, they will just have to get a little bit better at it, and market it. And I think that would be a huge boom in that industry.

Zach

I think it's very hard to think of an internet that isn't based on a platform ecosystem, I definitely think there's a case for thinking about an internet in the future where citizens aren't locked into corporations that hold their data in silos and only exist to I guess, produce profit for shareholders. Maybe we should be thinking about a new kind of social media that wrestles power away from the huge firms. And away from thinking of the platform economy as the only way forward, maybe thinking about more of open source software. Now, I don't think this regulation is going to take us that way. But it may hamper business interests a little bit. But I don't think having regulation is going to stop the US from being pro business at all. Like they've cracked down on monopolies in the past, whether it's Teddy Roosevelt, and so on. But it definitely needs some kind of legislation to prevent them from growing any bigger.

Adam

Mmm. And I think that data portability legislation, in particular is one that could have significant kind of tangible benefits for a lot of consumers and a lot of businesses. A lot of the other ones are kind of fairly abstract economic and market concepts, but legislation to make it easier to move from one service to another, whatever that service is, I think that's something that has a very kind of tangible benefit. So that's something that I could see actually going through in some form. But what about the rest of these bills? Do we think that these anti monopoly efforts in the broad sense are likely to succeed?

Zach

So I think some of the bills right now I have major issues with them, where they don't only hurt big tech firms, but they hurt smaller companies. So I would hope that first those issues are addressed. So the section 230 Bill, which basically protects companies from legal liability for content posted on their platforms, there is a Guardian article with comment from Evan Greer, who's the director of digital rights group Fight for the Future. So basically, the laws is only going to apply to large tech firms with five million or more monthly users. But it could have negative consequences for firms large enough to qualify for that, but still that have fewer resources on Facebook. So Greer basically said that Facebook would be able to survive that kind of bill, but smaller competitors wouldn't. Which is apparently why Facebook is calling for changes to Section 230. As I know it will solidly solidify their dominance and monopoly power. He called the bill well intentioned, but a total mess.

Adam

That's fairly damning.

Zach

Yeah. So I think hopefully, there'll be some changes made before they are out to be voted on, although we're not quite sure when that's going to happen.

Adam

Yeah, they could end up being quietly dropped from the agenda. which has happened before. Well, I'm afraid that's all we've got time for on this week's episode. But thanks once again to Justin and Zack for joining me.

Justin

Thanks for having me.

Adam

You can find links to all of the topics we spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website, or you can follow us on social media for more. Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts to never miss an episode. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review. We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT but until then, goodbye.

Zach

Bye!

The growth of major tech companies over the last decade has been seemingly unstoppable, but as organisations like Facebook, Microsoft and Google work their way ever deeper into our lives, the US government has set its sights on curtailing the worst of their perceived excesses. A number of bills have been introduced by both parties to try and limit their power in areas like data portability, market consolidation and self-regulation.

But why are lawmakers so up in arms about the conduct of tech companies? What behaviour has prompted this? And do these bills have any real chance of slowing tech companies growth, or will they die on the floor of the house? In this week’s episode, Zach Marzouk and Justin Cupler return to discuss the US’ current slate of anti-monopoly legislation, and what it could mean for the country’s business climate.

Highlights

“I think the most legitimate one I see on here, the one that has the most grounds to stand on, is the limiting of mergers and acquisitions. Because now you have startups that are literally starting up just for the plain goal of being acquired by one of the big giants. And these giants are gobbling them up, changing the name, putting it under their umbrella and running with it. And that is limiting a lot of innovation. It's limiting people who legitimately want to get a startup running, want to run this as an actual startup that's going to be successful. It's limiting those people's ability to do this in lieu of the people who want to go out there and just sell their startup for a billion dollars.”

“You can definitely bring in regulation to curb the power of big tech, but I don't know if it will go far enough, especially since the bills are still being discussed. So we don't know what the final bill would look like. I think if you look at China, and see what they've done in terms of regulation, which is probably the other end of the spectrum, compared to the US, they're definitely taking a stance against big tech. They're curtailing the power of tech giants, firing CEOs and so on. But I don't know if the US is going to go all the way and bring in the right legislation that will address the power of big tech.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• What is Section 230 and why does it matter?
• The IT Pro Podcast: Beating Trump on tech
• Senators seek to reform Section 230 protections
• The IT Pro Podcast: What does Joe Biden have in store for tech?
• Apple appeals Epic ruling in attempt to delay App Store changes
• Microsoft backs right to repair following investor revolt
• US targets big tech dominance with new antitrust bills
• Facebook calls for data portability legislation
• Facebook blames faulty configuration change for hours-long outage
• Microsoft to shutdown LinkedIn in China
• What is China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL)?
• China plots tougher cyber scrutiny for tech firms in Hong Kong IPOs
• Nick Clegg: Stop throwing rocks at Facebook
• New tools make it easier to run a business across Facebook's app ecosystem
• US senators demand Zuckerberg answers Facebook whistleblower's claims
• Zuckerberg will fight US lawmakers’ big tech breakup measures
• Lawmakers seek to rein in big tech with bills aimed at competition and liability | The Guardian

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20

Microsoft and Meta have announced a partnership that will see features from both companies' collaboration platforms integrate into one another to allow for cross-platform capabilities.

Formerly known as Facebook Workplace, Workplace by Meta will soon integrate features from Microsoft Teams into its own platform, such as livestreaming Teams video directly into Workplace groups.

The integration goes both ways and it will see certain Workplace content also becoming available to users on Teams.

Workplace will be integrated into Microsoft's software using an app within Teams which can be pinned to its navigation bar, if a user wishes. Once selected, a Workplace 'pane' will become visible to the side of the UI, which can easily be hidden or re-opened.

The move is a significant step for the two platforms the collaboration software market as a whole. With the launch of Workplace by Facebook in late 2016 being closely followed by Microsoft Teams in March 2017, the two platforms were considered rivals in a contested market that had, up until then, been dominated by the likes of Slack.

Although Workplace is pitched as a much more rounded tool for creating company forums, and Teams is better suited for instant collaboration between smaller teams, the two platforms effectively target the same enterprise audience.

“One thing I learned from the pandemic is that companies don’t just rely on one tool to get their work done, so it is our responsibility as leaders in the space to make sure the tools they use integrate and interoperate with each other,” said Jeff Teper, CVP product and engineering at Microsoft Teams.

Users on both platforms will also be able to interact with meetings hosted on the other, such as commenting and offering emoji-driven reactions, without having to swap apps.

Workplace by Meta said Vodafone, Flight Centre Travel Group, and Lockton - three of its customers - have already been trialling the integration. Flight Centre Travel Group said they use Workplace to foster a cross-company community and use Teams for cross-company collaboration, adding that the integration allows staff to access the information they need quicker.

Ujjwal Singh, head of Workplace at Meta, also said the integration had specifically been requested by Workplace customers Vodafone and Accenture, according to CNBC.

"The way our customers end up using it is customers use the complementary features, not the competing features," he told the broadcaster. "There are customers that are just Workplace shops, and then there are customers that are just Teams shops. This is really for those customers that use both."

The announcement deepens the partnership between the two companies as they vie for market share in the collaboration space. Workplace already supports integration into Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, and the Office 365 suite.

Workplace can also be integrated into Microsoft Azure AD and was named in the top 15 apps used on the platform in 2020. Additionally, Microsoft Teams will become available on Meta Portal starting in December.

The integration comes as a free update which is available to download now, though customers will have to wait until later in 2022 before they can stream meetings and broadcasts from Teams into Workplace.

Welcome to IT Pro's News in Review, a weekly bite-sized bulletin of the top tech stories of the week, for the week ending 5 November, 2021.

This week:

• Mesh for Teams is Microsoft's pitch for the metaverse
• Celebrity data leaked after ransomware attack on London's Graff jewellers
• Facebook is shutting down its controversial facial recognition system

You can find more videos like this in our video library and even more on our YouTube channel. Let us know what you think of this week's video – you can also find us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Facebook has announced that it will shut down its facial recognition programme after more than a decade of use.

The company, which recently rebranded to Meta, also said that it will be deleting all users' facial templates. The move will mark the end of website functionality such as automatic user detection in images and Automatic Alt Text - automatically generated descriptions of images used by visually impaired users that currently identifies people in around 4% of all photos on the site.

An exact date for the company's sunsetting of the technology has not been announced, but Facebook said the programme will end "in the coming weeks".

Acknowledging the situation as a "complex social issue", the social network said it wants to move away from the broad identification approach it previously used with its facial recognition tech and move closer towards focusing on narrower forms of personal identification. Such examples include accessing locked accounts, personal devices, and verifying identity in a financial product.

It added that private, on-device use of the technology may be a more adequate way of deploying it since there will be no communication of biometric data between the device and an external server.

Those who have opted-in for facial recognition on Facebook - more than a third of users - will no longer be automatically identified and their face data will be removed from records. Meta believes this will amount to more than a billion facial templates being deleted.

It's currently unclear if there is any other data associated with the programme that Facebook will be retaining. IT Pro has contacted the company for clarity but it had not responded at the time of publication.

Some corners of the tech industry feel the announcement may be a PR move, perhaps to deflect attention away from the recent stories that have surfaced following former employee Frances Haugen's landmark leak of 10,000 files.

"On one level this is a PR gesture - Facebook has much more invasive information about people than their faces," said Professor Mark Andrejevic, Faculty of Arts, Data Futures Institute at Monash University to IT Pro. "But as a PR move it's still an important one as it highlights the real public concern people have about the development of facial recognition technology."

“The destruction of the faceprints is significant. This is a biometric database that, if breached, would amount to a huge event in terms of the release of biometric data. It's rare that companies whose business is data, destroy such a large and potentially powerful database.

Consulting with outside experts along the way, Facebook will continue to work on facial recognition technology because it believes in its power to be a force for good in areas such as identity verification and prevention of fraud. Though, it said the positives have to be considered against the potential drawbacks.

"The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole," said Jerome Pesenti, VP of artificial intelligence at Facebook in a blog post. "There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.

"This includes services that help people gain access to a locked account, verify their identity in financial products or unlock a personal device," he added. "These are places where facial recognition is both broadly valuable to people and socially acceptable, when deployed with care. While we will continue working on use cases like these, we will ensure people have transparency and control over whether they are automatically recognised."

Some experts believe the decision to delete its facial recognition data is due to regulatory pressure that may be imposed in the future, potentially harming commercial relationships.

"Part of their reasoning to shut down the system could be that they realised the nature and type of consent gained may not meet the existing, or future, standards that regulators may expect for sensitive biometric data," said Peter Galdies, consultant at data protection firm DQM GRC. "This potentially renders all the data as unusable anyway.

"I imagine that commercial users of such data would also be somewhat sceptical of forming a business relationship with Facebook on these matters - considering the previous litigations that Facebook has been involved in with privacy regulators."

It's a sentiment that's echoed by other corners of the industry too. Alan Calder, CEO at GRC International Group told IT Pro: Facebook has only ever been interested in what profits Facebook, so shuttering its facial recognition options for one billion users will not be something that is intended to harm the company, but rather protect it from privacy regulators."

Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the Facebook Company will now be known as 'Meta', with its focus now directed towards bringing the CEO's metaverse vision to life.

The parent company of Facebook, which also covers brands like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus, was officially given a new name at its annual conference Connect 2021, forming a more distinctive umbrella company bearing closer resemblance to the likes of Alphabet.

While still overseeing its portfolio of global brands, Meta will work towards bringing Mark Zuckerberg's much publicised vision of the metaverse to life. The Meta CEO claims the "metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world".

Zuckerberg also said the metaverse will be a more immersive social media experience, where new environments can be built, virtual and augmented reality will take centre stage, and users will be able to do "almost anything they can imagine". Examples include playing games, working with multiple displays, watching TV, making personal video calls, and even attending concerts with friends.

All of this will be achieved using 'holograms' - virtual representations of physical things that users will no longer have to buy, like TVs and multiple work monitors, as mentioned previously.

Industry reaction

Amid Facebook's ongoing reputational crisis following the leak of 10,000 documents by former employee Frances Haugen, which led to a number of disparaging stories against the company, industry reaction to the news has been mixed.

Some experts feel the timing of the rebrand may be seen as particularly convenient given recent events plaguing the company's reputation.

“While it’ll help alleviate confusion by distinguishing Facebook’s parent company from its founding app, a name change doesn’t suddenly erase the systemic issues plaguing the company," said Mike Proulx, VP and research director at Forrester. "If Meta doesn’t address its issues beyond a defensive and superficial altitude, those same issues will occupy the metaverse.”

“The success of Meta’s metaverse strategy all comes down to trust," he added. "Forrester found that less than half — 41% — of online adults surveyed in the US say they trust Facebook (the company). In the UK it’s just 26%. If the majority of online adults don’t trust Facebook as a social media company, why would they trust it as a metaverse company? Without trust, Meta’s metaverse plans are already at risk.”

Others feel the rebrand will not be enough to restore customer trust in the company, especially given its history with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

“Big tech companies are taking steps towards consent-led data strategies, such as embracing first-party data and the phasing out of third-party cookies," said Tom Bianchi, VP Marketing, EMEA, at Acquia. "But, given the scale of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the recent whistleblower revelations, it’s clear Facebook has a long way to go before it regains consumer confidence.

"Along with its redirection, Facebook needs to ensure that the positive steps it’s taking to improve data privacy and reduce misinformation need to be properly promoted to its users. While the metaverse is an exciting prospect and one that deserves column inches, Facebook needs to focus on rebuilding its foundations first and foremost."

The news was also met with mockery from certain corners of social media, with both individuals and big businesses competing for 'likes' at the umbrella company's expense.

Some pointed to the fact Meta couldn't secure an optimal handle on Instagram, a platform it owns, having to settle for @wearemeta.

Others took aim at the word 'Meta' itself, with the Wendy's fast food chain changing its account name to 'Meat' after many users claimed to have misread the word on first inspection.

A more positive outlook

Meta's rebrand seems to have made some progress in warming some corners of the industry. For example, prominent consumer technology leaker Jon Prosser announced that he was a fan of the Meta rebranding to his 400k+ following, adding that the Connect 2021 flagship announcement changed the way he felt about the CEO.

The future vision for a commute-less, largely hardware-less world where people can both work and play in a convenient, interactive environment is one that may excite some businesses too, especially now companies are in the early stages of exploring post-pandemic hybrid and fully remote approaches to work.

However, the main focus on the metaverse is the social element and how the gaming world will collide with social. The metaverse has the opportunity to overhaul the way in which people socialise virtually, which may not be a bad thing according to some.

"The 'Metaverse' doubters will be having to rethink after the Facebook rebrand," said Roxanne Harley, director of client strategy at Azerion. "As the gaming and social worlds combine, this is only a further indication that virtual worlds are here to stay and are on a trajectory to completely shake up how brands will interact and engage with audiences."

The UK government must act now to regulate Facebook, whistleblower Frances Haugen told MPs on Monday.

The data engineer and scientist, who worked for Facebook for two years prior to sounding the alarm about the tech giant’s practices, testified before the Online Safety Bill committee on Monday about the dangers created by the social media platform.

Haugen warned MPs that “Facebook is closing the door on us being able to act”.

“We have a slight window of time to regain people[‘s] control over AI,” she told members of the committee, who are working on new legislation that could see social media companies fined up to 10% of their annual turnover, or £18 million, for failing to quash online abuse.

Haugen said that work on the Online Safety Bill ​​has been largely ignored by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, yet the legislation could have the potential to set a precedent for other countries.

"The UK has a tradition of leading policy in ways that are followed around the world,” she told Parliament, adding that she was "incredibly proud of the UK for taking such a world-leading stance".

Haugen told MPs that, due to shortages of moderators, Facebook had been unable to police harmful content in multiple languages around the world, leading to civil unrest in Ethiopia and Myanmar. However, the issue also impacts the UK, she added, due to Facebook’s AI’s inability to detect online abuse in British English.

"UK English is sufficiently different that I would be unsurprised if the safety systems that they developed primarily for American English were actually under-enforcing in the UK,” she told the committee.

The hearing comes days after Facebook claimed that its AI managed to reduce the prevalence of hate speech by 50%.

Haugen also hit back at claims made by the Telegraph on her stance on end-to-end encryption (e2ee), saying that she had been ‘misrepresented’ by the publication.

She said that, contrary to the Telegraph’s report published on Sunday, she fully supports “e2e open source encryption software”, using it herself on a daily basis.

“I want to be very, very clear. I was mischaracterised in the Telegraph yesterday on my opinions around end-to-end encryption,” Haugen told MPs, adding that she is “a strong supporter of access to open source end-to-end encryption software”.

“Part of why I am such an advocate for open source software, in this case, is that if you’re an activist, if you’re someone who has a sensitive need, a journalist, a whistleblower — my primary form of social software is an open source, end-to-end encryption chat platform,” she said.

However, Haugen said she was sceptical about the legitimacy of Facebook’s e2ee.

In August, Facebook added the option of e2ee for voice and video calls on its Messenger communications platform, defying warnings from the UK government about the technology’s risk to children’s safety. Weeks later, it also extended e2ee to WhatsApp backups.

Despite the negative attention and increased scrutiny from US and UK officials, Facebook managed to generate a profit of $9.2 billion (£6.67 billion) during the third quarter, according to financial earnings results published on Monday.

Welcome to IT Pro's News in Review, a weekly bite-sized bulletin of the top tech stories of the week, for the week ending 22 October, 2021.

This week:

• Apple unveils redesigned MacBook Pro with M1 Pro, M1 Max chips
• Facebook to hire 10,000 workers across the EU
• Scottish schools serve up facial recognition for school dinners

You can find more videos like this in our video library and even more on our YouTube channel. Let us know what you think of this week's video – you can also find us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Facebook's Oversight Board has released its first Transparency Report, slamming the social media giant for not providing enough information on a controversial system called cross-check.

The report, released today, covers Q4 2020 and the first half of 2021. In it, the board complains that Facebook had not been transparent enough about the cross-check system, originally designed as a quality-control measure for actions taken on high-profile accounts. A September report from the Wall Street Journal found the company used the system to exempt high-profile users from its rules.

Practices included using low levels of review on some accounts, effectively whitelisting them.

"Facebook failed to explain that some percentage of this content is not reviewed and remains on the platform despite its initial assessment as violating Facebook policies. This is a good example of how less-than-forthcoming answers from Facebook deprived the Board of critical information and context," the report said.

Whitelisted accounts could spread misinformation and, in one case, nude photos of a privileged account holder’s alleged rape victim, which millions of fans saw before they were taken down.

The board could not properly review the cross-check system due to a lack of information from Facebook, it complained.

"In the Board’s view, the team within Facebook tasked with providing information has not been fully forthcoming on cross-check," the report said. "On some occasions, Facebook failed to provide relevant information to the Board, while in other instances, the information it did provide was incomplete."

Facebook admitted its description of the cross-check system to the board was misleading. The report continued, adding Facebook failed to properly explain how it selected accounts to include in the initiative. The social media company told the board that the system only applied to "a small number of decisions," but the Wall Street Journal found it applied to almost six million accounts.

Former-President Donald Trump's Facebook account was included in cross-check, but the company failed to mention this to the board when it referred a complaint about that account's suspension to the board. The system only came up incidentally, when Facebook employees responded to a question from the board about that case.

The board announced it will review the cross-check system and make recommendations on how it can be changed, at Facebook's request. The social media company will provide more documents relating to the system, it added.

The board received over a half million user appeals in the review period, proceeding with just 17 of them. It decided 11 of those cases by the end of June, overturning Facebook's decision eight times.

Facebook has hit back at reports which claim its artificial intelligence (AI) fails to detect hate speech by claiming that the technology managed to reduce its prevalence by 50%.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a report based on internal documents and employee testimonials which show that the social media platform manages to remove only “a low-single-digit percentage” of posts that violate its rules of conduct.

The AI used to identify harmful content has problems detecting first-person shooting videos and racist rants, according to the report, as well as telling the difference between cockfighting and car crashes. However, it is more affordable to use than human reviewers, which in 2019 were costing the company “$2 million a week, or $104 million a year”, according to the WSJ.

Facebook’s VP of Integrity, Guy Rosen, issued a response to the article hours after it was published, stating that the hate speech has been reduced by almost 50% during the last three quarters.

According to the company, “prevalence is the most important metric to use because it shows how much hate speech is actually seen on Facebook”.

“Recent reporting suggests that our approach to addressing hate speech is much narrower than it actually is, ignoring the fact that hate speech prevalence has dropped to 0.05%, or 5 views per every 10,000 on Facebook,” said Rosen.

When it’s uncertain whether a post violates Facebook’s terms, its visibility is reduced by limiting its distribution and not being recommended to users. This is done in order to protect those who post “content that looks like hate speech but isn’t”, such as “describing experiences with hate speech or condemning it”. The company also stated that 97% of removed content is identified by its algorithm, up from 23.6% in 2016.

Facebook didn’t address the WSJ’s claims that the decision to use AI to monitor hate speech was motivated by costs.

These latest allegations come amid a difficult month for the social media platform, which was recently accused by former product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen of repeatedly prioritising profits over user safety. On 4 October, Facebook, as well as its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram, also suffered a six-hour outage.

Facebook is set to create 10,000 jobs across the European Union in its quest to facilitate the creation of an AR and AI-powered “metaverse” for collaborative working.

The five-year plan will see an average of 2,000 roles created across the 27-country bloc annually. While the company has described these jobs as “high-skilled”, it’s given little detail as to what kinds of employment will actually be on offer. IT Pro has contacted Facebook for more information.

In an announcement from VP of global affairs and former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, and VP of central products, Javier Olivan, the company called the move “a vote of confidence in the strength of the European tech industry and the potential of European tech talent”.

“Europe is hugely important to Facebook. From the thousands of employees in the EU to the millions of businesses using our apps and tools every day, Europe is a big part of our success, as Facebook is invested in the success of European companies and the wider economy,” the two said.

They also listed “a number of competitive advantages” the EU has over other territories, including a large consumer market and universities that are internationally recognised for their excellence.

The announcement also stated the EU has “an important role to play in shaping the new rules of the internet”, saying: “European policymakers are leading the way in helping to embed European values like free expression, privacy, transparency and the rights of individuals into the day-to-day workings of the internet” – values the company says it shares and has taken “considerable action” to uphold over the years.

As to the location of these 10,000 jobs, the announcement didn’t list any particular towns or cities where these roles will be based and the company hadn’t responded to a request for further information on this at the time of publication. Clegg and Olivan did, however, point to the company’s centres for AI and VR in Paris and Cork respectively, as well as grants it has issued to the Technical University of Munich.

Data breaches have become all too common. Not a week goes by without news of some company or organization learning they cyber criminals have hacked them.

The breaches often compromise people's Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, email and physical addresses, credit cards, and other data. Such data theft leaves people open to issues such as identity theft.

Here are some of the worst hacks of all time.

1. Yahoo

Number of people affected: 3 billion

By far the worst hack of all time happened to Yahoo in 2013 when hackers compromised around 3 billion people’s data.

At the time, the figure was reported as just 500 million, still enough to make it the biggest hack in history. However, it would be another four years before Yahoo admitted the figure was closer to 3 billion.

The hacked data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, encrypted passwords, and unencrypted security questions.

The person responsible for the hack was Karim Baratov. He was later given five years in prison and had to pay the victims restitution and $2.25 million in fines. For its part, Yahoo had to pay out $50 million in damages and offer free credit monitoring services to millions of its users.

2. Marriott

Number of people affected: 383 million

The Starwood group of hotels, which includes Sheraton, W Hotels, Westin, Le Meridien, Four Points by Sheraton, Aloft, and St. Regis, had been compromised sometime in 2014. This was before the Marriott Hotel group acquired it in 2016. It wasn’t until 2018 that Marriot found evidence of a breach through an internal investigation.

This meant for four years, the company had been the victim of a hacking campaign on Starwood’s reservation system. Cyber criminals exploited an unpatched vulnerability to hack the system.

While it was initially thought the hack affected 500 million people, this final number was 383 million. The hackers stole names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, email addresses, and unencrypted passport numbers.

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined the Marriott chain £99 million ($135.95 million). The ICO said that Marriott ``failed to undertake sufficient due diligence" during the acquisition and missed the vulnerability as a result.

3. Facebook

Number of people affected: 533 million

In April 2021, a hacker published 533 million users’ details on a low-level hacking forum. The data contained phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, previous locations, birth dates, relationship status, and biographies. It also includes some of their email addresses.

Facebook said the issue stemmed from a vulnerability it patched in 2019, so technically, the data was scraped from the website.

Alon Gal, chief technology officer of cyber crime intelligence company Hudson Rock, said in a tweet the data would still be of interest to cyber criminals.

4. LinkedIn

Number of people affected: 500 million

The scraped data of over 500 million LinkedIn profiles was put up for sale on a popular hacker forum in April 2021. The The hacker had already leaked two million records as proof of the existence of the much larger data treasure trove, according to reports by Cybernews.

The data included LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, and professional titles.

A spokesperson for LinkedIn said the posted data appeared to “include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies.”

5. Equifax

Number of people affected: 143 million

In 2017, Equifax disclosed personal information of more than 145 million people was compromised. While the breach was big, what stood out was the quality of the data hackers harvested.

In addition to full names, dates of birth, and addresses, some victims also had drivers' license numbers, credit card information, and Social Security numbers stolen.

Facebook has halted its work on a version of its Instagram social network for children, citing a need for more collaboration with parents and policymakers.

The company had been working on Instagram Kids, a version of its photograph and social networking service for children ages 10 to 12. In an announcement, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that the company was stopping its work on the app temporarily.

"This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today," he said.

Mosseri referenced recent reporting in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), revealing leaked internal research documents from Facebook acknowledging Instagram had a negative effect on teen girls' mental health.

Over the weekend, Facebook's head of research Pratiti Raychoudhury published a rebuttal to the reporting, arguing it was inaccurate and some of it was based on a small sampling of teens.

Mosseri added the pause in work didn't mean that Instagram Kids was a bad idea. He pointed out that TikTok and YouTube have developed versions of their apps for children under 13. TikTok and YouTube have been sued for violating childrens' privacy rights. Regulators have also investigated Instagram's child data management in the past.

In the UK, politicians have called for regulators to impose a duty of care on social media companies that force them to mitigate their effects on children's mental health.

The pausing of work on the Instagram Kids project follows the launch of an investigation into Facebook's effect on teens. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, announced the move following the WSJ's report.

"The Wall Street Journal’s reporting reveals Facebook’s leadership to be focused on a growth-at-all-costs mindset that valued profits over the health and lives of children and teens," said the senators in a statement. "When given the opportunity to come clean to us about their knowledge of Instagram’s impact on young users, Facebook provided evasive answers that were misleading and covered up clear evidence of significant harm."

Facebook's global head of safety Antigone Davis will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Thursday.

Facebook is to promote head of hardware, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, to chief technology officer as a replacement for Mike Schroepfer, who is set to step down after 13-years in the role.

The change, which will take place next year when Schroepfer becomes a senior fellow, highlights Facebook's plans to increase its hardware output and build out it's 'Metaverse' vision.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg paid tribute to Schroepfer's "extraordinary contributions" to Facebook and the "critical role" he has played in building teams, mentoring leaders, and developing new technologies the company now uses, such as AI and virtual reality.

"Schrep and I have had a close partnership over the years, and in addition to being a great leader, he's also a great person and a close friend," Zuckerberg said.

There is currently no fixed date on the change, with Facebook only pointing to "sometime next year", but Schroepfer is set to become the social network's first senior fellow. In this new role, he will focus on recruiting, developing technical talent and continuing to foster the company's investments in new technologies.

When Bosworth takes over as CTO he will still continue leading the company's hardware group (Facebook Reality Labs) while also assuming responsibility for broader software engineering and artificial intelligence efforts.

"As our next CTO, Boz will continue leading Facebook Reality Labs and overseeing our work in augmented reality, virtual reality and more, and as part of this transition, a few other groups will join Boz's team as well," Zuckerberg said in a statement. "This is all foundational to our broader efforts helping to build the metaverse, and I'm excited about the future of this work under Boz's leadership."

Facebook is still a relative newcomer to consumer hardware but the company has significantly ramped up its efforts in recent years under Bosworth's watch. His Reality Labs team already has over 10,000 employees, making it the largest department after the company's engineering organisation he is set to take over.

Provided by

The strain businesses have faced during the pandemic has shifted trends in leadership towards more empathy for the employee experience. 90% of companies responding to one survey reported their culture had improved because of the focus from leaders on a sense of community.

So how can we keep up this trend and make it the new normal? The next generation of business leaders will bring new values and perspectives to the workplace, creating companies with connected, engaged employees that result in better business outcomes.

Download this whitepaper to discover the four traits leaders of connected companies have in common.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent a letter of protest to Facebook, warning the company should not have used its consent decree with the FCC to justify banning three researchers’ accounts this week.

The social media platform disabled three New York University academics’ accounts who worked on Ad Observer, which uses browser extensions to watch ads that Facebook and YouTube show users. The project attempts to understand how social media platforms decide which advertisements to show people, especially political content.

The extensions, which only look at what is inside an ad frame and do not collect data about comments or other user details, are installed and used with user consent.

In an August 3 blog post, Facebook accused the researchers of scraping data and said the project violated its terms of service. "We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC Order," it said.

Facebook's consent decree with the FTC stemmed from 2012 when the two parties settled over claims the social media giant misled users over its privacy protections. Last year, the FTC amended the privacy order to include additional provisions from a $5 billion settlement that the two parties reached in 2019 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook later clarified its position to Wired magazine, explaining that the violation was of its own privacy terms created in response to the FTC order rather than the FTC order itself.

However, Samuel Levine, acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, still took issue with Facebook's original statement citing the FTC privacy order. In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he said the company's insinuation that the FTC's consent decree required an account ban was inaccurate.

"The FTC is committed to protecting the privacy of people, and efforts to shield targeted advertising practices from scrutiny run counter to that mission," he said. "While I appreciate that Facebook has now corrected the record, I am disappointed by how your company has conducted itself in this matter."

He added Facebook had failed to check with the FTC before making its statement. "Had you honored your commitment to contact us in advance, we would have pointed out that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest," he said. "Indeed, the FTC supports efforts to shed light on opaque business practices, especially around surveillance-based advertising."

Other organizations, including Mozilla, criticized Facebook's justification for the move. The organization reviewed the open source Ad Observer code twice before recommending it and was happy it did not violate user privacy.

"It does not collect personal posts or information about your friends. And it does not compile a user profile on its servers," Mozilla said this week.

A high-profile senator is launching an effort to hold social media companies like Facebook accountable for publishing misinformation about vaccines and other public health crises.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced a bill called the Health Misinformation Act, which would carve out an exception to the landmark internet law known as Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 shields social media giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter from being sued over users’ content.

Klobuchar’s bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Ray Luján (D-N.M.), would create an exception to that law’s protections in the case of a public health crisis like COVID-19.

“For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.”

“The coronavirus pandemic has shown us how lethal misinformation can be and it is our responsibility to take action,” added Klobuchar, who chairs the influential Senate Judiciary subcommittee that oversees antitrust legislation.

According to Politico and Vox, the Health Misinformation Act may face long odds, partly because it currently has no Republican support.

Klobuchar’s bill would hold Facebook and other social media platforms liable when their algorithms spread and amplify health misinformation related to an “existing public health emergency” such as COVID. The US Secretary of Health and Human Services would define what constitutes “health misinformation” in such an emergency.

Section 230 has become an increasingly popular target in Washington, D.C., where president Donald Trump tried to kill it outright, president Joe Biden wants to rewrite it, Congress keeps threatening to repeal it, and big tech CEOs keep showing up to defend it.

When it became law 25 years ago, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube didn’t exist. As written, Section 230 prevents an “interactive computer service” from being treated as the publisher of third-party content. Essentially, it says websites can’t be held legally liable for any content that’s posted by third parties — with a few exceptions such as sex trafficking or copyright violations.

Over the past quarter-century, this has been interpreted as a handy get-out clause for social media companies, as it prevents them from being held responsible for anything their users post.

Facebook has asked Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan to recuse herself from the Commission's decision to refile its antitrust case against the social media giant.

The FTC and 46 states had sued Facebook in December, alleging the company used monopolistic practices to extend the dominance of its social networking platform. The complaint cited activities including Facebook's purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, along with its alleged use of anti-competitive terms and conditions with software developers. Guam and the District of Columbia also sued.

At the end of June, a federal judge threw out the suit, arguing prosecutors failed to provide enough evidence the company holds a monopoly in the social networking market. States had also waited too long to bring their case, he added. He gave the FTC 30 days to refile the case but also suggested it would face serious challenges if it did so. The FTC has been deliberating on whether to refile.

In its petition, Facebook argued Khan has a history of public statements accusing Facebook of anti-competitive conduct. "Indeed, she has led an organization lobbying the Commission to impose particular remedies against Facebook and, more recently, commented publicly as to her personal beliefs on the merits of the very complaint filed by the Commission last December," the petition said.

Facebook's petition follows a similar one Amazon filed last month, which also called for Khan to recuse herself from the FTC's investigation into the e-commerce giant's practices. The investigation is separate from an antitrust lawsuit that Washington, DC filed against Amazon in May.

Khan is an outspoken advocate for traditional antitrust principles, which she laid out in a 2017 Yale Law Journal article. That article, which addressed Amazon specifically, argued it might be necessary to view large tech companies like Amazon as common carriers.

Her response to the petition will be pivotal to the decision about refiling the Facebook case, which will fall to the FTC's commissioners for a vote. Khan's vote cements a 3-2 Democrat majority on the commission. Without her, it is unlikely the vote will make it through.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, and TikTok have committed to changing their moderation policies to protect women from abuse online.

The announcement, made at the UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris, was orchestrated by the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) in response to rising concerns over harassment online. The social media giants have agreed to a set of commitments developed during WWWF workshops on tackling gender-based abuse online.

The commitments focus on two areas: content curation and online abuse reporting. On the curation side, the workshops found that women needed more control over what they see online and who could comment on their posts. They also highlighted the need for better systems to report abusive content.

Each commitment has four considerations. On the curation side, companies must offer more granular settings over who can see and reply to posts. They must also provide more accessible language throughout the user experience, easy navigation and access to safety tools, and actively reduce the amount of abuse women see online.

The reporting commitment requires companies to offer users the ability to manage and track their reports, increase their capacity to address context and language, provide more policy and product guidance when reporting abuse, and establish additional channels for help and support during the reporting process.

The WWWF said it would measure the companies' performance in these areas and report it annually.

The foundation cited an Economist Intelligence Unit report measuring online violence against women.

The report found that 85% of women reported witnessing online violence against other women, including outside their networks. It also found 38% had personally experienced online abuse.

The most common abuse was misinformation and defamation, as 67% of survey respondents experienced it. The least common types of abuse were violent threats, which an alarming 52% of survey respondents reported experiencing.

Other abuse tactics included publishing personal information, impersonation, sharing damaging information across multiple platforms, image- and video-based abuse, and stalking or hacking.

Some of the tech firms supporting the commitments have some work to do regarding the more equitable treatment of various groups online and offline.

TikTok has drawn criticism for allegedly telling moderators to suppress videos from users deemed not attractive or rich enough and from users with disabilities. Google, which already changed its harassment reporting policies following a mass employee walkout, drew flak late last year for allegedly dismissing AI ethics co-lead Timnit Gebru after she questioned the company’s treatment of women and people of color.

Last year, Plan International sent an open letter to social media platforms demanding action after its survey found that harassment across the most popular platforms is driving girls and young women offline.

While the federal government is poised to spend billions expanding broadband service and helping bridge the digital divide, an FCC commissioner is pitching a different idea: Make Big Tech pay for it instead.

Brendan Carr, the senior Republican FCC commissioner, called for tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to help pay for federal efforts to connect more American households to broadband internet.

"It is time to fundamentally rethink how we fund our high-speed networks," Carr wrote in an op-ed published in Newsweek. "We should start requiring Big Tech to pay its fair share."

After the COVID-19 pandemic helped expose the depth of the digital divide in the US, policymakers in Washington, DC are pledging to bring broadband service to more remote regions and low-income households. The Biden administration is calling for $100 billion in spending to connect every American household to broadband internet by the end of the decade.

Meanwhile, Carr is arguing Congress should tax big tech to pay for it.

"Big Tech has been enjoying a free ride on our internet infrastructure while skipping out on the billions of dollars in costs needed to maintain and build that network," Carr said. He pointed to a study showing that online streaming by just five companies — Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, and Microsoft — account for a whopping 75% of all traffic on rural broadband networks.

"Yet Big Tech derives tremendous value from these high-speed networks," Carr added. "Indeed, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google generated nearly $1 trillion in revenues in 2020 alone — an almost 20 percent increase over the prior year."

Who mostly pays for that internet infrastructure? Carr points out that ordinary Americans pay for it, through taxes on their monthly phone bills. Those taxes go into the FCC's Universal Service Fund, which helps subsidize broadband expansion in rural areas.

It's outdated, Carr argues. "This is like taxing horseshoes to pay for highways."

Carr has no power to make any of these changes himself. He's one of five commissioners who oversee the FCC. Instead, he's calling on Congress to do it.

"Legislators could consider a range of potential revenue streams that have a sufficient nexus to the internet, including video streaming services like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime; online advertising services like those offered by Google and Facebook; Apple's App Store and devices; content delivery networks and cloud services like AWS and online gaming services like Microsoft's Xbox," Carr suggests.

However, lobbying groups such as the Internet Alliance, which represents the world's largest internet companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, argue against "taxing the internet" to fund broadband.

Secure messaging application firm Signal just highlighted how much data Facebook collects about its users in a clever piece of media hacking.

Signal, which prides itself on not tracking its users, set out to demonstrate to Facebook users how much data they're giving up.

The company created an ad campaign on Instagram using the Facebook-owned photo and messaging app's multi-variant ad targeting system. This uses the detailed profiles Facebook builds about its users to deliver them appropriate advertisements. Instead of using this targeted demographic data to sell products to a carefully segmented demographic, Signal designed the advertisements to tell recipients what Facebook knew about it explicitly.

"The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible," the company said when explaining the project.

Examples of the ads included: "You got this ad because you're a K-pop-loving chemical engineer. This ad used your location to see you're in Berlin. And you have a new baby. And just moved. And you're really feeling those pregnancy exercises lately."

Other examples Signal posted identified users’ marital status, including a recent divorce, and more nuanced situations like being in an open relationship. Ads also relayed recent purchases and new hobbies. They also called out the kinds of content that specific Instagram users like to read online.

According to Signal, Facebook disallowed the ad campaign. "Being transparent about how ads use people's data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook's world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you're doing from your audience," it continued.

This media hack is another small blow in Facebook's ongoing battle against privacy advocates. In March, the US Supreme Court rejected Facebook’s appeal to scale back a $15 billion class-action lawsuit accusing it of illegally tracking its users' activity.

Facebook is also involved in an ongoing spat with Apple, which has introduced privacy changes in iOS 14 that give users an opt-in prompt to enable in-app tracking. Facebook responded by inserting messages in its app that guide users to opt in.

Facebook's enterprise communications platform, Workplace, now has seven million paid subscribers, representing a 40% increase year-on-year.

Launched in 2016, Workplace has traditionally been one of Facebook's lowest-earning business units, often counted alongside the likes of Oculus and Portal under the "other" section of its financial results.

However, its steady growth and brand association has helped it secure some high profile customers, including the likes of Spotify and Starbucks - although it still lags behind market rivals Slack and Microsoft Teams.

"We built Workplace as an internal version of Facebook to run our own company, and it was so useful we started letting other organisations use it too, including everyone from Spotify to Starbucks to the World Health Organisation," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. "More companies are starting to use our virtual reality tools for work as well, and I'm excited to build more new ways for people to work together that weren't possible before."

Microsoft Teams revealed last month that it has surpassed 145 million daily active users - a yearly increase of 93%. Slack no longer reveals user numbers but, as of September 2019, the company recorded 12 million daily active users, almost double that of Facebook's Workplace.

As it looks to continue increasing users, Workplace has also announced a few new features, such as a live Q&A function and an integration with Microsoft 365 and Google G Suite's calendar. There are also 'diversity-focused' updates, such as emojis with different skin tones and a service that allows users to show their colleagues the correct way to pronounce their name.

The feature offers phonetic spellings.

All the major tech giants are going green. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and IBM have all launched plans to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the next decade.

Now, just in time for Earth Day, Facebook has announced it’s achieved its goal of powering its global operations on 100% renewable energy. It’s also reached net-zero emissions, a goal it set three years ago.

The company has achieved this by investing $8 billion to build a network of 63 new wind and solar plants, all located on the same power grids as Facebook’s data centers.

“Although we’ve reached our latest goal, the work isn’t over,” the company said. “We will contract new solar and wind projects to remain at 100 percent renewable energy, even as we continue to grow.”

“We’ve already set a new goal that in 2030, we will reach net zero emissions across not only our own operations but also our value chain — our suppliers, as well as items like business travel and employee commuting.”

To reach that goal, the social media giant is working with its suppliers to invest in high-quality carbon-removal projects and continue to find innovative ways to reduce emissions.

In the meantime, Facebook has become one of the world’s largest corporate buyers of renewable energy. Today, it has contracts in place for more than 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar energy across 18 states and five countries.

In 2020 alone, Facebook contracted for 1 GW of new renewable energy and brought 2 GW of renewable energy projects online to support its operations.

Virtually all the major players in the American tech world have launched large-scale green initiatives in recent years.

Netflix recently announced that it’s pursuing a net-zero carbon strategy. The streaming giant will join IBM, Apple, and Microsoft in their green initiatives, which they aim to complete by 2030.

“We believe that climate change is an urgent issue facing the world today,” Facebook said, “and we are committed to doing our part to address this challenge.”

Facebook is partnering with Google in planning two new undersea cables to connect North America, Indonesia, and Singapore.

The move comes just weeks after Facebook scrapped plans for an underwater data cable between California and Hong Kong because the US government feared China could have used the cable to steal data. Facebook is confident it will win approval for the project this time around.

“We are working with partners and regulators to meet all of the concerns that people have, and we look forward to that cable being a valuable, productive transpacific cable going forward in the near future,” Facebook’s vice president of network investments, Kevin Salvadori, told Reuters.

Underwater cables carry most of the world’s data and are a vital part of global communications. Groups of communications firms typically build these cables and then charge other companies to use them.

Facebook is partnering with Google and regional telecommunication companies on these two proposed cables as part of an ongoing effort to boost internet connection capacity between the regions. The cables will still need regulatory approval before the project goes forward.

The new undersea cables, named Echo and Bifrost, are the first to follow a new route crossing the Java Sea, the company said. Facebook predicted the cables would increase overall subsea data capacity across the Pacific by about 70%.

This new development comes shortly after Facebook canceled plans to install an 8,000-mile-long fiber-optic cable running along the ocean floor to connect Hong Kong and Taiwan with two California sites.

Facebook killed the project because of pressure from US national security officials who raised concerns that an undersea cable to Hong Kong would be vulnerable to Chinese espionage.

That was only the latest cross-Pacific undersea data cable to stall because of US government resistance.

In September, developers canceled plans for a separate underwater cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong because the US government believed the Hong Kong operators had a relationship with Chinese intelligence and security services.

A third undersea cable between the U.S. and Hong Kong was also canceled last year when Facebook withdrew its proposal to lay a cable between Hong Kong and San Francisco.

All these plans were killed after the US Department of Justice warned the FCC against direct links between the US and Hong Kong because of Chinese crackdowns in the region.

Since its launch in 2016, Workplace has aimed to bring the powerful tools and addictive user experience of Facebook to corporate environments, with the intention of improving staff engagement and communication.

Remote working was already on the rise when COVID struck, but the ongoing health crisis has made it a priority for every job that can be done remotely to be made as accessible as possible for people working from home.

To this end, Slack - now owned by Salesforce - and Microsoft’s rival Teams have been providing vital communication between now-remote colleagues, alongside video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Google Meet.

Workplace includes unified communications, with voice, video and text chat. However, it adds a lot more: personal blogs, events, and both formal and informal groups for staff. Its knowledge management features make a compelling alternative to an office intranet, and there’s polling and checklists for rudimentary project tracking in there, too.

It really is a corporate version of Facebook - for better and for worse.

Facebook Workplace review: User experience

Workplace looks and feels a lot like Facebook. Whether that’s a user experience advantage or not may depend on whether your company’s staff actually use or care for Facebook, but either way, the user interface is undeniably clear and easy to navigate.

Its desktop browser interface tiles neatly on higher resolution monitors, but is most comfortable occupying the entire screen on resolutions of 1920x1080 or less. You can enable dark mode via a menu accessible from your profile icon at bottom left, which is very easy on the eyes if you’ve been staring at a screen all day.

The interface is split into a large content pane on the right, a narrower tabbed index to its left and, at the far left, a narrow icon pane that allows you to switch between your home view, notifications, chat and, if you have access, the Workplace admin panel.

The Home screen opens on your News Feed, which behaves much as it does in the traditional version of Facebook: you can share posts, videos or images to your timeline, and see posts from the colleagues and groups you follow.

When you create a post, Workplace prompts you, uninspiringly, with a line asking “What are you working on?”. You can @mention others, use emoji, start live video streams, and share location check-ins, images, animated gifs and pre-recorded H.264/AAC videos up to to 720p.

There are plenty of formatting options available for posts, including markdown support, lists and code blocks. Posts can also be scheduled in advance, so you don’t have to let the entire company know that you’re still working at 2AM.

Live video streaming - not to be confused with video chat - supports your average smartphone or USB camera, external hardware encoders, and software such as Xsplit, Wirecast and OBS. An excellent addition is support for Real-Time Messaging Protocol over SSL (RTMPS) to help secure your content, although you’ll have to ensure that any external encoder you use supports this if you want to stream from it.

Facebook Workplace review: Knowledge management

So far, so Facebook. Next down on the Home navigation column is the Knowledge Library. This is a genuinely useful addition, allowing you to create neatly formatted documents in a tree structure, with a powerful search feature that brings to mind Atalassian’s Confluence.

Workplace suggests using this for corporate handbooks and policy documents. It’s also useful for sharing style guides, documentation and even code and scripting examples, although the otherwise generous formatting options unfortunately lack code blocks or markdown support.

You can attach files of up to 50MB to your Knowledge documents, but file type support is somewhat limited, so we couldn't attach a DLL that went with a chunk of our documentation until we compressed it. Once shared, users can discuss the documents via comments, and edit them if they have appropriate privileges.

It could be a little easier to publish Knowledge Library files - inviting people to view a parent file in a tree doesn’t automatically share its children with them, for example - but the system is nonetheless outstandingly useful and feels more elegant and streamlined than similar features other hybrid project/comms solutions such as Basecamp.

Facebook Workplace review: Keeping in contact

Groups work much as their Facebook counterparts. They’re ideal for individual project teams and workgroups, but also for company-wide pet photo sharing and sign-ups for the next virtual pub quiz. You get a few extra posting features in these, including the ability to create events, video chatrooms, shared documents, polls, checklists of actionable items, and Q&A sessions.

The final entry on the Home navigation pane is People, which is populated with links to the colleagues you interact with most often – this opens on a chat window, but you can also get to their profiles, ‘about’ pages and various other content they’ve created or interacted with via a shortcut bar. An Add People button allows you to invite others from either inside or outside your company’s verified domain.

A directory allows you to browse everyone in the company Workplace, while an Events tab lets you schedule private or company-wide events as you please, with associated discussion pages. Oddly, this doesn’t include the ability to schedule a video conference in advance.

You can save a range of posts and other content via the three-dot menu you’ll find at the top right of most content, and these can all be found in your Saved tab, although you can’t save content from the Knowledge Library to these bookmarks.

Facebook Workplace review: Notes, Notifications, and Navigation

Notes, like the corresponding section of the core Facebook product, houses your own private drafts and public notes; these are for individual staff members’ personal use, while the Knowledge Library is designed to be a more general reference for all employees or team members.

The Follow Coworkers tab, meanwhile, allows you to see all your colleagues and quickly subscribe to their feeds – they aren’t notified when you follow or unfollow them, which is a nice touch. Finally an org chart can be used to illustrate the company’s departmental and managerial relationships.

Below that, you’ll find sections listing the groups and people you interact with most frequently.

A cluster of extra icons at the top of the furthest-left navigation pane provide quick access to a few more helpful features. Notifications are pretty self-explanatory, covering both updates from your colleagues and changes to Workplace itself. As a product under active development, you’ll see the latter with some regularity.

In one such recent change, Group notifications default to selected highlights, and you have to manually opt in if you wish to be notified about all posts from a group. That’s fine for your company pet appreciation group, but less than ideal for key main project groups, so keep an eye on those notification settings.

The Chat tab lists every group and private chat you’re in and is Workplace’s Messenger-inspired communication solution to compete with Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Administrators get an extra settings icon below this, and at the very bottom, everyone gets a trio of icons. These let you provide feedback to Workplace itself, get help and – via your own user icon at bottom left – set your status, enable Do Not Disturb mode, check your activity, and access your account settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Unified communications

While it’s widely regarded as an alternative to Slack or Teams, Workplace’s core communications features aren’t exactly peerless. Video chats are limited to 50 people – fewer even than the free tier of Google Meet. Video quality of the calling system (which is forked from WebRTC with a few enhancements) isn’t bad, though, so you’re well sorted for sensibly-sized meetings.

Group calls are supported under Firefox, Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, notably Edge and Opera. However, Linux users may experience issues when using Firefox, and should use Chromium instead.

There’s also a desktop video chat app for Windows and MacOS. You can create new video chatrooms from either the news feed or the chat pane, but not from events. Events also don’t get associated chatrooms. However, the Workplace team is currently working on ways to integrate live video streams into events more fully.

Each group can have its own chatroom too, and you can see an overview of them all via your Chat tab, but we missed the compact layout we’ve become accustomed to in rivals such as Slack. Your entire chat history and individuals’ profiles are both searchable, and #topics are supported to help keep things on track. However, although you can directly reply to chat messages, there’s no reply threading, which, as with Discord, can make busy rooms feel cluttered.

You can’t adjust how much space your central chat window takes up relative to the channel list and right-hand About sidebar, either. The general layout feels a great deal like Facebook Messenger, and that doesn’t translate entirely well to a business tool, although the mobile app is rather more streamlined.

Facebook Workplace review: Quality of life

Workplace’s default notification settings mean that you’ll get a lot of email: every time someone adds you to a group, every time you’re mentioned or interacted with, and to keep you up to date with a significant chunk of the activity in your groups. This is one of those rare cases where most people will be best off disabling emails and enabling in-browser or on-device push notifications via their Workplace account settings.

You can’t block messages from anyone inside your organisation, but you can block people from outside it who’ve been invited to participate in a shared multi-company chat. You can, however, block specific co-workers from inviting you to events via the settings pages.

You can also limit who can see your posts, hide comments containing certain words and review both posts that tag you and tags added to your posts before they appear on your profile. There’s a highly customisable Do Not Disturb mode, too, supporting both one-off and scheduled settings.

If you’re a member of multiple Workplaces, you can switch between them via the bottom-left personal menu options; this is less convenient than Slack’s implementation, but works well enough given that Workplace has a larger and more feature-packed interface.

Workplace supports ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ pronouns, configurable alongside your name in general settings. It also has none of Facebook’s weird name restrictions, and use of Workplace is entirely unrelated to the possession or status of a standard Facebook account. Two-factor authentication is supported via the security settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Administration

The Administration panel is hugely comprehensive and not actually as overwhelming as it might appear at first glance. You get a lot of data about what your company’s staff are up to, with features such as a security panel tracking password use, malware and poorly secured accounts. If you’ve got an ultra widescreen monitor, enabling full width mode makes this a lot easier to parse at a glance.

You get very granular control over rights and access privileges, as well as over company roles and the content in your Workplace. Administrators can highlight posts as important, group them together in campaigns and send out surveys.

A couple of more unusual features are worthy of note: you can add staff members to a frontline workers group. This is intended for deskless workings, including non-office and even casual staff, such as cashiers, field engineers, warehouse workers and delivery personnel.

These accounts can be claimed by the worker using a code, rather than via email, and are mobile-first, rather than hinging on the desktop interface. The mobile app provides quick access to the same content as the desktop version, and enables front-line staff to quickly communicate with each other and with their managers, regardless of where they are, as well as providing easy access to knowledge documents. Extra restrictions can be applied to staff in the frontline set, such as barring them from creating Workplace groups.

Workplace also has its own version of Facebook’s Safety Check system, which allows you to ask your staff to indicate whether they’re okay or not in case of a localised crisis, such as a building fire or natural disaster, and pin relevant updates to the top of the Workplace feed.

There’s also less practical stuff, like badges – while it’s useful to know who the fire wardens are and who’s new to the business, awards for effort, helpfulness and participation feel like shiny, patronising trinkets of no real value, and might not be as popular with workers as Workplace seems to expect.

As you’d hope, you can connect Workplace to other cloud services, including Sharepoint, Google Drive and OneDrive, but not the broader features of Office 365 or Google Workspace. Its reasonably comprehensive library of integrations also includes Zoom, BlueJeans and WebEx video conferencing, Jira and Salesforce, but there’s no support for anything that competes with Workplace’s core communication features, such as Slack or Teams.

Facebook Workplace review: Pricing

Workplace has two subscription tiers: Advanced, priced at an extremely competitive $4 per user, per month, and Enterprise, which costs $8 per user, per month. Charities, educational establishments, and some other non-profit organisations may be eligible for a free tier via the Workplace for Good scheme.

Enterprise gives you unlimited storage, compared to 1GB per user for the Advanced subscription, as well as faster and more comprehensive support, with a dedicated team and 4-hour initial response time, compared to Advanced users’ 24-hour potential delay. Enterprise subscribers also get early access to new features and an enhanced peer-to-peer version of the Enterprise Live video streaming system.

Advanced is marketed at small businesses or teams within larger companies, while Enterprise (unsurprisingly) targets large enterprises, but there’s not a great deal to choose between them.

Facebook Workplace review: Verdict

On paper, Workplace is a slightly perplexing attempt to bring social media style interaction to a business environment. In practice, though, you get a competitively-priced hybrid solution with elements of chat and video communication, blogging and vlogging, knowledge management and even lightweight project management capabilities. That’s a lot of functionality - even if some of it is questionably useful.

The Knowledge Library, support for extended posts, and community tools are things we’d like to see more of in business communications platforms, particularly as many of us are settling in for the long haul when it comes to remote working.

However, Workplace isn’t as on point when it comes to its core unified communications, with chat that feels slightly clunky, lack of automatic video and chatrooms for events, and video conferencing tools hampered by some irritating limitations. That’s something we hope to see improve, because Workplace’s focus on building a sense of community among colleagues is a useful take on internal business communications.

Facebook may have paid $4.9 billion more than it had to in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations of privacy mishandling.

According to a Delaware court ruling yesterday, Vice Chancellor Joseph Slights of the Court of Chancery public released information from papers prepared by a law firm advising Facebook’s board of directors as they debated a proposed $5 billion settlement with the FTC. According to reports, the agreement also protected CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Slights cited the paper in a ruling that directed Facebook to turn over internal documents to Rhode Island’s public employee pension fund. The fund is questioning how the FTC came to an agreement with Facebook over personal data misuse.

The fund is investigating whether Facebook executives agreed to pay billions more as part of a settlement over Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of personal data to shield Zuckerberg from personal liability in the case. Delaware law allows investors access to internal files if they have legitimate questions over directors’ mismanagement.

Cambridge Analytica harvested millions of Facebook users’ personal data and helped Donald Trump win his presidential bid in 2016. The data was also used to win a referendum that saw the UK leave the EU.

“The documents already produced provide no insight into why Facebook would pay more than its (apparently) maximum exposure to settle a claim,” said Slights in the ruling reported by Reuters. He added that shareholders were “right to question whether internal communications among Facebook fiduciaries might shed light on the Board’s thinking in this regard.”

According to the Gibson Dunn paper, slights said Facebook faced a maximum penalty of about $104 million. The FTC deal with Facebook in July 2019 was thought to resolve issues around how Facebook handled user privacy. At the time, the company admitted no wrongdoing.

According to Reuters, Slights hasn’t ordered Facebook to turn over documents it claims are protected by attorney-client privilege. Slights’ reasoning was in part because shareholders could gain insights from non-privileged electronic communications he ordered Facebook to disclose.

The FTC and Facebook are yet to make a response to these reports.

The ruling comes as the FTC probes how major tech companies’ collect and manage user information, including minors’ data.

Tech giants Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have frozen political donations as America struggles with its constitutional crisis.

These and other companies, which normally donate to organizations via their political action committees (PACs), have suspended those activities in the wake of last week's riots at the US Capitol.

Speaking to Axios, Facebook said it’s pausing all PAC contributions for at least the first quarter of 2021 after last week’s attacks, which were spurred by president Trump's disinformation about election fraud. The company will also review its spending policies, a spokesperson added.

Microsoft has also suspended political donations while it reviews the implications of the Capitol riots. The company drew criticism from its employees last week, who noted that the company had declared support for a peaceful transition of power while also donating to politicians who challenged the election results.

This is not the first time Microsoft has suspended political donations through its PAC. It usually pauses political contributions during the first quarter of a new Congress, it told reporters, adding it will "take additional steps" this year, consulting with employees. In July 2019, a leaked letter revealed that Microsoft suspended PAC activities for a few months while it took time out to consider employee feedback about its donations.

Google also told reporters it would pause donations for the time being while assessing its policies. “We have frozen all NetPAC political contributions while we review and reassess its policies following last week’s deeply troubling events,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC.

While these companies imposed bans, others limited their actions to specific political factions. Amazon told CNBC it would freeze donations to lawmakers who voted against certifying the election results in Congress last week. Airbnb said the same, as did AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.

The donation freeze in the tech and communications industry mirrors decisions among other large corporations. Axios noted that investment giant BlackRock, medical device manufacturer Boston Scientific, BP, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase would freeze all PAC donations for the time being. Marriott International, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Dow said they would freeze contributions to those who voted against certification.

In the wake of the Capitol riots that killed five people, Congresspeople are moving to impeach President Trump for incitement of insurrection in his final days in office. The FBI released an advisory this week warning of violent nationwide protests in the coming days as the country prepares for President-elect Biden's inauguration.

The internet has been one of the most revolutionary technologies of our age, and most agree that the transformation it’s brought to our society has been beneficial. Social media – one of the more recent arrivals on the scene – has also generally been a good thing, allowing us to connect with friends and family across the world, find people who have similar interests to us, and rapidly share jokes, memes and information.

This latter element, however, has slowly turned from a benefit into a problem. Disinformation and what might be termed “fake news” is seeping in everywhere, making it difficult to know what and who to believe.

In this week’s episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we speak to Andy Patel, a researcher with cyber security firm F-Secure, about what disinformation is, how it spreads and the negative effects it could have on businesses.

Footnotes

• QAnon: What is it and where did it come from?
• FBI warns of hackers spoofing its domain
• Dems ask Facebook, Google and Twitter for coronavirus disinformation reports
• WhatsApp restricts message forwarding to curb spread of 5G myths
• What is phishing?
• IT Pro Live: Fighting terrorism with technology
• Fake news 'is killing our minds', says Tim Cook
• Trend Micro's free web-based tool takes on hackers and fake news
• WhatsApp counters fake viral messages with new fact-check tool
• Satirical websites target Mark Zuckerberg with fake news
• Trump confirms US cyber attack on Russia election trolls
• What is hacktivism?
• The IT Pro Podcast: What COVID-19 can teach us about open data
• Biden team signals president-elect may target Section 230 and data privacy
• Dems ask Facebook, Google and Twitter for coronavirus disinformation reports
• Google turns its hand to fighting election abuse
• Facebook facing scrutiny amid claims it encourages spread of misinformation
• The IT Pro Podcast: The truth about 5G

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20

Facebook faced a double whammy from the US government recently, as the Department of Justice sued the company for discriminatory hiring practices and reportedly investigated its virtual reality business.

In a complaint released Thursday, the DOJ accused Facebook of favoring H-1B visa holders over Americans. This isn’t the first time in this year the H-1B visa program has drawn the ire of the US government, as President Trump attempted to freeze the program in June.

Under Department of Labor rules, temporary overseas workers must interview for a permanent position at their employer. The company must also advertise that position to others and interview applicants s normal. If the company can’t find a suitable worker in the US, it can hire a temporary H-1B worker. These workers can continue working in the US if they complete a permanent labor certification process.

"When certain employees holding temporary immigration status at Facebook asked the company for permanent positions through the permanent labor certification process, Facebook creates a permanent position that is open only to that temporary visa holder," the complaint said. The DOJ also claimed Facebook intentionally deterred US workers from applying by failing to advertise those positions on its website and not accepting applications online.

The DOJ's complaint follows an investigation that began in October 2018. It said that in the 11 months to September 2019, Facebook filed 2,651 requests to convert temporary workers to lawful permanent residents, and 2,606 of those succeeded. The DOJ claims the average salary for those positions was over $156,000.

The government has asked the court to force Facebook to pay civil penalties and damages to each alleged victim of discrimination who lost wages due to its practices.

Bloomberg also warned that the DOJ has been talking to developers about possible antitrust practices within Facebook's virtual-reality business. The DOJ claimed the company, which bought VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, has used its power in the VR market to favor its technology over others.

Bloomberg spoke to developers who alleged the social media giant had deliberately engineered its VR platform not to work with their products, only to launch competitive ones shortly afterward. One developer said the company ordered him to remove a streaming feature from his Oculus software before launching a competing product called Oculus Link.

A competitor also told Bloomberg Facebook uses predatory pricing by selling headsets at a loss to flood the market. Another developer claimed Facebook forces them to pay a 30% commission on content sold through its platform. Apple, which also charges a 30% fee for content sold through its App Store, recently reduced its fee to 15% for smaller developers.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has sued Facebook over its discriminatory hiring practices and is reportedly also investigating the company's virtual reality business.

In a complaint released Thursday, the DoJ accused Facebook of favoring H-1B visa holders over Americans. This isn’t the first time in this year the H-1B visa program has drawn the ire of the US government, as President Trump attempted to freeze the program in June.

Under Department of Labor rules, temporary overseas workers must interview for a permanent position at their employer. The company must also advertise that position to others and interview applicants s normal. If the company can’t find a suitable worker in the US, it can hire a temporary H-1B worker. These workers can continue working in the US if they complete a permanent labor certification process.

"When certain employees holding temporary immigration status at Facebook asked the company for permanent positions through the permanent labor certification process, Facebook creates a permanent position that is open only to that temporary visa holder," the complaint said.

The DoJ also claimed Facebook intentionally deterred US workers from applying by failing to advertise those positions on its website and not accepting applications online.

The DoJ's complaint follows an investigation that began in October 2018. It said that in the 11 months to September 2019, Facebook filed 2,651 requests to convert temporary workers to lawful permanent residents, and 2,606 of those succeeded. The DoJ claims the average salary for those positions was over $156,000.

The government has asked the court to force Facebook to pay civil penalties and damages to each alleged victim of discrimination who lost wages due to its practices.

Bloomberg also warned that the DoJ has been talking to developers about possible antitrust practices within Facebook's virtual-reality business. The DoJ claimed the company, which bought VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, has used its power in the VR market to favor its technology over others.

Bloomberg spoke to developers who alleged the social media giant had deliberately engineered its VR platform not to work with their products, only to launch competitive ones shortly afterwards. One developer said the company ordered him to remove a streaming feature from his Oculus software before launching a competing product called Oculus Link.

A competitor also told Bloomberg that Facebook uses predatory pricing by selling headsets at a loss to flood the market. Another developer claimed Facebook forces them to pay a 30% commission on content sold through its platform. Apple, which also charges a 30% fee for content sold through its App Store, recently reduced its fee to 15% for smaller developers.

Today, the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter will appear before the Senate Commerce Committee to answer questions about the social platforms’ alleged conservative bias. Lawmakers are also threatening to change Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies’ ability to moderate user-generated content.

The hearing, which began livestreaming at 10:00 a.m. ET, is taking place less than one week before the US presidential election, and the social media companies have been preparing to deal with election misinformation campaigns. Republicans have accused Facebook and Twitter of bias, censorship and election interference due to their actions to slow the spread of fake and content.

The Senate Commerce Committee released a video before the hearing about the social platforms’ bias against conservative accounts. However, independent studies have determined there is no substantial evidence of the social media companies’ bias against right-wing posts.

"We ensure that all decisions are made without using political viewpoints, party affiliation, or political ideology, whether related to automatically ranking content on our service or how we develop or enforce the Twitter Rules," said Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter. "Our Twitter Rules are not based on ideology or a particular set of beliefs. We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our Twitter Rules fairly."

According to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the company conducts its business without political bias.

"To do otherwise would be contrary to both our business interests and our mission, which compels us to make information accessible to every type of person, no matter where they live or what they believe," said Pichai.

Section 230 will be central to the hearing. Social media companies have invoked this law in numerous court cases to dismiss lawsuits about their users’ messages, videos and other content. According to Section 230, "interactive computer services" are legally separate from users who generate this content. So, no one can accuse Twitter, Google and Facebook of publishing or "speaking" their users’ words.

The courts have accepted Section 230 as a defense against defamation, negligence and other allegations in numerous cases. The social media CEOs have stated Section 230’s importance to their businesses and how reducing its effectiveness would lead to more content takedowns.

"I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators, which is why in March last year I called for regulation on harmful content, privacy, elections, and data portability,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook. “We stand ready to work with Congress on what regulation could look like in these areas."

There have been more attacks on Section 230 recently because Facebook and Twitter have limited the distribution of New York Post’s articles about "smoking-gun" emails about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, and his dealings in Ukraine.

Facebook decided to "reduce distribution" of the article "pending fact-check review" as part of its policy against misinformation. Twitter blocked users from tweeting links to the story under its policy against spreading "hacked materials."

It’s not clear whether the emails attributed to Hunter Biden were hacked, copied, or fabricated. According to a US official and a congressional source familiar with the matter, US authorities are investigating the connection between the published emails and Russian disinformation efforts targeting the Biden campaign.

Facebook began as a project to connect students at Harvard, the college Mark Zuckerberg attended. Now, the social media goliath is going back to its roots — sort of — by launching Facebook Campus to help connect college students to classmates and college happening.

Facebook Campus is a part of the Facebook app that allows users to create a separate Campus profile. They then link it to their college using their college email address and anticipated graduation year. Students can also add their major, minor, classes and hometown to get even more personalized interaction.

Once Campus is set up, users can find groups and events at their school and connect with other students who share the same interests. Plus, when they share information on their Campus, it is only available to other students on the Campus.

It also offers a Campus-only news feed that keeps all Campus members up to date on events, people and groups on that Campus. Users also have access to a Campus directory to find classmates based on the classes, major, graduation year and more. Finally, students can create Campus chatrooms for their dorm, clubs and groups.

Facebook Campus will start small with the following colleges and universities:

• Benedict College
• Brown University
• California Institute of Technology
• College of William & Mary
• Duke University
• Florida International University
• Georgia Southern University
• Georgia State University
• Johns Hopkins University
• Lane College
• Lincoln University (Pennsylvania)
• Middlebury College
• New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Northwestern University
• Rice University
• Sarah Lawrence College
• Scripps College
• Smith College
• Spelman College
• Stephen F Austin State University
• Tufts University
• University at Albany – State University of New York
• University of Hartford
• University of Louisville
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
• Vassar College
• Virginia Tech
• Wellesley College
• Wesleyan University

Facebook hasn’t mentioned plans to expand Campus to other colleges.

According to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, one of four co-chairs of Facebook’s incoming Oversight Board, heavy-handed regulation will not solve the social media industry’s problems. She also warned that an aggressive regulatory approach could impact freedom of speech.

Thorning-Schmidt told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe,” “If regulation gets too heavy, it actually will impact freedom of speech very heavily. I believe in regulation, I believe that politics has to play a role.”

“I also think we have to be a little bit careful than just demanding regulation, because at some point it will just tip over and be a regulation on our freedom of speech, and I don’t think any of us want that,” she added.

Thorning-Schmidt used recent events in Belarus as an example. Following widespread protests over the results of its most recent presidential election, in which President Alexander Lukashenko declared a landslide victory, Belarus instituted a government-imposed internet outage.

Facebook first announced its oversight board in November 2018. The social media company named Thorning-Schmidt as one of the initial members in May. Before joining the group, Thorning-Schmidt served as the prime minister of Denmark.

The oversight board will reportedly have the power to overrule Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when it comes to deleting controversial posts. It will also manage appeals from Facebook and Instagram users, as well as questions from Facebook itself.

The board isn’t expected to be operational until later this year. Other oversight board members include Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian newspaper, and Andras Sajo, VP of the European Court of Human Rights.

Facebook has come under fire over its handling of hateful content and disinformation this year. In July, Stop Hate for Profit urged Facebook to address hate on the platform. The group called on Facebook to hire a C-suite executive with civil rights expertise and begin participating in third-party audits of identity-based hate and misinformation on the site.

Facebook has announced a new policy for disclosing vulnerabilities in third-party software detected by its internal security researchers. The company will publicly disclose vulnerabilities in third-party code and systems, including open-source software, 90 days after reporting them, should there be no fixes.

However, if third-party developers don’t respond to reports within 21 days, the social media giant has threatened to disclose these flaws publicly anyway, regardless of the status of any patches.

The firm has outlined these policies as it ramps up its efforts to identify and disclose flaws in order to ensure developers fix them as soon as possible, the company claims.

Although each vulnerability will be taken on a case-by-case basis, Facebook says there are occasions on which it will deviate from its 90-day requirement.

Disclosure will come sooner if any bug is being actively exploited or if a fix is ready but has been delayed unnecessarily, while in cases that a project’s release cycle may dictate a longer window, the bug’s publication will be delayed.

“In a nutshell, Facebook will contact the appropriate responsible party and inform them as quickly as reasonably possible of a security vulnerability we’ve found,” the company posted in an update.

“We expect the third party to respond within 21 days to let us know how the issue is being mitigated to protect the impacted people. If we don’t hear back within 21 days after reporting, Facebook reserves the right to disclose the vulnerability. If within 90 days after reporting there is no fix or update indicating the issue is being addressed in a reasonable manner, Facebook will disclose the vulnerability.

“That said, we will adhere to the vulnerability disclosure steps and the proposed timelines whenever reasonably possible, but we can envision scenarios where there might be deviations. If Facebook determines that disclosing a security vulnerability in third party code or systems sooner serves to benefit the public or the potentially impacted people, we reserve the right to do so.”

This has come in conjunction with the launch of a separate security advisory segment for WhatsApp, the launch of which revealed six new flaws affecting versions of the online messaging platform, ranging in nature and severity. The flaw CVE-2020-1894, for example, is a stack write overflow bug, while CVE-2020-1889 is a security feature bypass issue in WhatsApp Desktop.

Facebook��s programme is fairly similar to industry-standard vulnerability disclosure schemes, particularly in terms of the 90-day publication policy which has been adopted by many rival tech companies. Google’s Project Zero, for example, has touted the benefits of a 90-day disclosure policy, also rolling out an automatic 90-day disclosure policy in January.

Apple, by way of contrast, was criticised for implementing an effectively ‘limitless’ disclosure window on its new internal iPhone bug-hunting scheme, with security researchers describing these policies as a “poison pill”.

Today, Facebook announced it’ll tighten the clamps down on all political ads the week leading up to the election on Nov. 3. It’ll also forbid other election-related posts moving forward.

In an effort to maintain the integrity of the election, Mark Zuckerberg announced that starting on Oct. 27 — exactly one week before the presidential election — Facebook will stop allowing all new political ads. According to Zuckerberg’s post, the ban is because Facebook may not have “enough time to contest new claims.”

Facebook will, however, allow existing approved ads to run, but nothing new will be approved in that last week.

On top of this limitation, Facebook will also limit COVID-19 claims as they relate to the election. First, it’ll delete any posts that claim you will catch COVID-19 by participating in in-person voting. Second, any post that uses COVID-19 as a deterrent for voting will have a link to authoritative information on COVID-19 attached to it.

Facebook will also attach an “informative label” on any post that attempts to delegitimize the outcome of the election. It’ll do the same to any posts that discuss the legitimacy of various voting methods, like claiming one type of voting is more prone to fraud.

Finally, if either candidate declares they won before the election is final, Facebook will add a label that links back to the official results from Reuters and the National Election Pool.

Why all these changes just two months ahead of the election? According to Zuckerberg, “This election is not going to be business as usual. We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy. That means helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest.”