Facebook wants to show advertisers that their tracking ads make you visit their bricks-and-mortar stores and buy their stuff. To do this, they’ll use phones’ location services to track whether people actually walk into the stores after seeing an ad. The company’s new Local Awareness ad features will be fascinating for businesses and depressing for the rest of us. Businesses can now include a...
Facebook has decided on quite the way to convince people to download Moments: by threatening to delete thousands of photos if they don’t. The notice has to do with a photo syncing feature that was recently removed from Facebook’s main mobile app. Starting in 2012, the core Facebook app was able to automatically upload photos from a phone’s local camera roll to a private album on Facebook....
Facebook has a link problem. Earlier this week, a security researcher named Inti De Ceukelaire detailed a curious fact about how Facebook Messenger treats privately shared links. Through the right API call, De Ceukelaire was able to summon links shared by specific users in private messages. The links were collected by the Facebook crawler, where De Ceukelaire discovered they were easily accessible to anyone...
Facebook could be listening in on people’s conversations all of the time, an expert has claimed. The app might be using people’s phones to gather data on what they are talking about, it has been claimed. Facebook says that its app does listen to what’s happening around it, but only as a way of seeing what people are listening to or watching and suggesting...
Facebook will now display ads to web users who are not members of its social network, the company announced Thursday, in a bid to significantly expand its online ad network. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook will use cookies, “like” buttons, and other plug-ins embedded on third-party sites to track members and non-members alike. The company says it will be able to better target non-Facebook...
The past several years have done wonders for Facebook’s once-murky public reputation. After a series of privacy-related controversies and a rocky debut in the stock market, the company embraced and quickly came to dominate the time we spend on mobile devices. More than a billion of us use its apps every day, and they have come to serve as a vital connection between family...
Facebook’s Internet.org project, which offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global digital divide should be closed. However, we question whether this is the right way to do it. As we and others have noted,...
Facebook’s been taking a lot of heat lately for failing to understand (or pretending to fail to understand) how its Internet.org initiative spells trouble for net neutrality. As noted previously, Facebook’s vision has been to deploy a “free” walled-garden service like AOL to developing nations. Critics have been dropping out of Internet.org, stating they don’t like Facebook picking which companies get included in the...
Good news for advertisers, but maybe not-so-great news for users concerned about their personal data: Starting Monday, Facebook will use data it gleans from users for its new ad network, Atlas, which it will serve up ads on non-Facebook sites based on what Facebook knows about you. Atlas is a former Microsoft property that Facebook bought last year for around $100 million that Facebook...
Through its ubiquitous "like" buttons on publisher sites across the web, Facebook has long been able to watch the web surfing behavior of its 1.28 billion monthly users. Soon it will begin to use that information for ad targeting on Facebook. Facebook already enables retargeting to users who've previously visited specific websites and apps, which advertisers can turn on by affixing tracking software to...
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