Facebook censorship has increased 19% in the past 6 months

According to Mashable:

Global surveillance requests for Facebook user data in the first half of 2014 increased 24% from the second half of 2013, according to the social network's transparency report revealed on Tuesday. A total of 34,946 requests were made between January and June, including messages, IP addresses and account information. Censorship also increased worldwide; compared to the June through December 2013, the amount of content censored on Facebook increased by 19%, according to the report.

Facebook is not the only service that has seen such a sharp increase in surveillance requests and censorship. In September, Google revealed that requests for user data had increased 15% compared to the previous six months, meaning a 150% increase over five years. 

In a blog post accompanying the company's third such report,

Facebook said that it doesn't accept every single request for user data or request to restrict content.

Facebook said that it doesn't accept every single request for user data or request to restrict content.   Read More

'Save' Facebook Content to Read Later

Collect everything from links and places to movies, TV, and music so you don't miss out on a new recipe or restaurant.

PCMag.Com - Can't get enough of those BuzzFeed quizzes or long-form news stories friends post to Facebook, but just don't have the time to dive into them during work? Now you can save them to the social network to read later.

Collect everything from links and places to movies, TV, and music so you don't miss out on a new recipe or restaurant to try out.

All saved items are kept secret, unless you choose to share them with online friends.

Reminiscent of third-party services like Pocket (formerly Read It Later), Instapaper, and Readability, Facebook's built-in tool makes it easy to save the latest news on Kim and Kanye without having to leave the site.   Read More

The Dark Side Of Facebook, Where People Lie, Steal, And Make Millions

 

Business Insider - On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message.

“Bro.”

The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.

Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.

“Site’s down :(.”

Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they're young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others' sites.

Facebook - Fyk said he received this Facebook wall post right as his site was crashing.

Anthony prefers the name the Community, and he readily admits — albeit communicating only under a pseudonym — that the group’s activities include hijacking valuable Facebook pages for fun and viral fame. (Meanwhile, Anthony and his cohorts refer to the WTF team as the Neckbeards.)

 

One of Fyk’s employees quickly determined that FunnierPics.net was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) reflection attack. When Fyk’s team contacted the host, GoDaddy, they learned an estimated 70,000 servers had gone dead, resulting in more than 1 million customers losing web service. Fyk’s IP address, GoDaddy confirmed, was the attackers’ target. The others were collateral damage.   Read More

Landlord May Be Liable When A Tenant's Facebook Harassment Leads To A Rape

Forbes - If you’re a landlord, what should you do if you learn that a resident is harassing another tenant on Facebook or other social media websites? If your answer is “nothing,” you might be making a mistake, as illustrated by a recent case from an Ohio appellate court.

The case involves the interactions between Haynes, the live-in boyfriend of Schmidt (who was on the lease, while Haynes wasn’t), and Lindsay, another tenant who lived in the apartment right directly above. Lindsay repeatedly complained about the noise coming from Schmidt’s apartment, and in response Lindsay alleged that Schmidt and Haynes retaliated in a variety of ways, including loudly banging on her door and screaming at her. Subsequently, Lindsay received a pseudonymous message at her Facebook account asking her to have sex and linking to a pornographic video depicting people who looked similar to Lindsay and Haynes. In response to Lindsay’s repeated questions, Haynes didn’t admit to being the author of the Facebook messages, but Lindsay had numerous reasons to believe it was him.

Lindsay provided the Facebook transcript to the landlord and allegedly asked to be released from her lease because she feared Haynes. Instead, the landlord recommended she contact the police (which she did) and moved her to another apartment in the complex. The landlord also allegedly told Haynes and Schmidt that it was moving Lindsay and warned them to leave Lindsay alone. The landlord discovered Haynes wasn’t on the lease and told him he’d have to leave. Haynes tried to get onto the lease but his credit wasn’t approved, so the landlord didn’t add him to the lease but also didn’t evict him.

A few days after Lindsay’s relocation, Haynes raped Lindsay in her new apartment. He was convicted of this crime and received a 9 year jail sentence. Lindsay then sued the landlord for mishandling the situation.   More

Facebook Is About To Remove A Setting That Helps Control Who Sees Your Profile

Business Insider - Changes are coming to your Facebook page.

The social media giant is taking the last steps to remove an old search setting called “Who can look up your Timeline by name?" which controlled who could find you and see your status updates and photos.

The search setting was automatically removed last year for people who weren't using it.
If you are using it, you will get a notification in the coming days, letting you know it will be removed:

As a reminder of the importance of privacy on Facebook, the best way to control what people can see is to choose the audience that can view each of the individual things you share.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-search-timeline-2013-10#ixzz2hMpAuzaZ

Facebook Home isn't where your privacy is

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook Home 

at a press event in Menlo Park, Calif., on April 4, 2012.

(Credit: CNET/James Martin) 

 

 

CNET - Facebook's latest attempt to get you to spend more time with its services bodes ill for the privacy-minded, but not all hope is lost.
 

When Mark Zuckerberg and friends debuted Facebook Home yesterday, they downplayed the ever-growing importance your data has for the company. While the Facebook-obsessed may love Home, chances are your privacy won't feel welcome at all.

Facebook has earned a reputation for developing new products and features that are respectful of user privacy, and then slowly, sometimes with great subtlety and sometimes with mastodon-like lumbering, walking those policies back to a decidedly less-respectful state.

There's little indication that Facebook Home will be any different. At the Facebook Home question-and-answer session that followed Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg said, "Analytics are made anonymous and used for half a percent of the user base." He added that that's the same as Google and Apple, which sounds reasonable, right?

The catch is that the more you share on Facebook, the more Facebook learns about you, and Facebook Home is designed to make you want to share even more.

Privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani agrees, and he explained that Facebook Home bridges the gap between passive data collection and active data-creating activities -- such as when you "Like" something in Facebook. "It's in the middle of every interaction on your device," 

More
 

Friend mining: Facebook preps for social search future

When it comes to social search, it's not just Facebook versus Google. It could also be Facebook versus Quora, Yelp and Foursquare.

 

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)

 

 

CNET - No other company in the world holds as much personal data as Facebook, which puts it in an ideal position to cull data from your friends and friends-of-friends, and even those you don't know, to bring you answers to your deepest questions. Such as, "What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked?"

Ok, maybe that's not your deepest questions, but it's the example that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used during an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference earlier this month when he was talking about the intersection of Facebook and search.

"Search engines are evolving" to "giving you a set of answers," Zuckerberg said. "Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions people have."

You could call Facebook's notion of search "friend mining," extracting specific answers to question by mining the immensely data-rich social graph. Zuckerberg was coy about when Facebook would launch a more capable search engine, but allowed, "At some point we will do it. We have a team working on search." His remarks certainly got the attention of Facebook watchers and Wall Street analysts, who have been speculating about how Facebook, with its nearly one billion users, could harness all that personal data and generate Google-like revenue from search.

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What Zuckerberg must do to right the Facebook ship

Investors are starting to panic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg needs to calm the masses while building revenue-generating products.

 

Zuckerberg's first three months as a public company CEO have been rocky.

CNET - All is not well at Facebook. Some have even started calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg's head. But the panic is premature, and the social network has plenty of time and opportunity to turn things around.

Facebook's stock price has traveled south since its flashy (and disastrous) debut in May. Facebook closed at $19.44 per share on Wednesday, barely half of its $38 IPO price.

Why is Facebook's share price dropping like a boulder off a cliff? M&A specialist Marty Wolf provides an excellent explanation, but I'll summarize the key points:

• Facebook's price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) for the last 12 months was 72.4, which puts it way above the P/E ratios of Google (20.0), Apple (15.7) and Yahoo (17.0). This would be fine if Facebook's revenue growth were accelerating, but it isn't.
• Facebook currently makes approximately $5.12 per user on an annualized basis (calculated from its most recent quarterly figure of $1.28 per user). It would need to boost that more than sixfold, to just over $33 per user, with its current userbase (about 900 million users) to justify a $38 share price.

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Facebook Buys Facial Recognition Startup Face.com

Forbes -

Facebook has acquired facial recognition technology company Face.com, according to a Face.com blog post.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed though various reports peg the price at $80 million to $100 million. The Israeli startup, which provides automated facial recognition of photos, also has a mobile photo app called Klik.    More

Why Google+ Can Still Beat Facebook

Even as Facebook goes public and nears 1 billion users, Google+ still has a chance to become a major contender if it simply plays to its own strengths. 

 

PCWorld - Now that Facebook has gone public and is nearing an astounding 1 billion members, it’s a good time to ask whether Facebook’s main rival, Google, can compete in the social networking game.

Google said in April that 170 million users had “upgraded to Google+,” but the company has been coy when it comes to specifying how many of those people actually use the social network on a regular basis. Some observers have suggested that it's mainly Google employees and hard-core Google loyalists who actively use the service today.

I still think Google+ can win out against Facebook in the end. But to do that, Google must learn how to play to its own strengths.

A lot rides on whether Google can pull that off. For ad targeting, Google can collect the data it needs from the subjects of people’s Web searches and the content of email, but that data isn’t nearly as personal and valuable as the stuff people willingly provide to Facebook every day. Social network data is far more individual and preference-oriented than other kinds of targeting data, and the long-term competitiveness of Google’s advertising business (96.5 percent of its revenue) may depend on Google's ability to get that data.

If anybody has a battle plan for Google+, it’s Larry Page. The Google cofounder and CEO has given some good reasons why Google+ will become a contender, but his reasons seem highly theoretical at this point.

‘Circles’ More Closely Resembles Real Life

Page says that the “Circles” structure in Google+ offers a great way to organize your friendships. He’s right: The Circles design is immediately intuitive; it’s easily understandable, and it works because it replicates the way we manage relationships in real life.    More

Facebook reportedly building phone with ex-Apple engineers

CNET - Interesting how the very week that Google became a hardware maker with the closing of its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, there's talk of another Internet giant making a similar move.

The New York Times' Nick Bilton reports today, citing unnamed sources, that Facebook is hoping to release its own smartphone by next year.

Bilton's sources include Facebook employees and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook's plans, he says. Those briefed on the plans told Bilton that the company has already hired more than six "former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad."

Of course, this builds on earlier reported attempts at a Facebook phone. In November, AllThingsD reported that Facebook had tapped HTC to build a smartphone that integrates the social network at its core in an effort code-named "Buffy." DigiTimes later reiterated that report saying HTC was working in cooperation with Facebook on a phone that could be launched as early has the third quarter of 2012.

And TechCrunch first starting talking about efforts for a Facebook phone in fall 2010.
It should be noted as well that in February 2011 at Mobile World Congress, HTC unveiled two new smartphones that feature dedicated Facebook buttons: the HTC ChaCha, which eventually became the HTC Status (review here), and the HTC Salsa.
From Bilton's report   >>>>>

The Top 10 Web IPOs of all time (pre-Facebook, that is)

CNET - It wasn't long ago that the investment community was unsure if there would ever be a resurgence in IPOs. Just a few years ago, companies that, back in the late 1990s, would have jumped at going public, were balking at the idea, deciding instead to focus their efforts on growing and eventually being bought out. It was believed by some that another great Web IPO might not come along for many years.

But now, Facebook is set to change that. And by doing so, it will surpass some of the most prominent companies to ever bring services to the online world.

In the following slides, we're going to take a look at the largest Web IPOs in history, courtesy of a list compiled by Renaissance Capital, an investment-research firm that specializes in IPOs.

As one might expect, some of the latest big IPOs are included in the list, including those from Google and Zynga, but other, prominent companies you might expect to see won't be there. Renaissance's list is arranged by the biggest deal size in history, giving some additional sway to more recent IPOs that garnered huge cash in their opening.

So, without further adieu, flip your way through the slides to find out which Web companies posted the largest IPOs in history.       

Watch the Slideshow!

The Best and Worst Times to Share on Facebook, Twitter

Mashable - Want your link to get the most traction on Twitter? Post it on a Monday between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. ET.

Link shortening and tracking service bit.ly has released new data on the best and worst times to share links on popular social networks, from Facebook and Twitter to blogging site Tumblr.

The company revealed that posting links to Twitter between the hours of 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. ET will give you the highest click rank, especially on days earlier in the week.

Meanwhile, sending a tweet with a link after 8:00 p.m. should be avoided — as should posting links after 3:00 p.m. on Fridays.

The half-life of a link posted to Twitter is about 2.8 hours, according to bit.ly.

However, Facebook’s optimal posting times are slightly different than Twitter. Links sent between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. get the most traction, with Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. being the best time to post on Facebook all week.      More

New Tweaks on: Facebook, Twitter, and Google

Mouse-hover behaviors on Twitter, status updates on Facebook Messenger, and a whole mess of tweaks over at Google Search.

Twitter added hover behavior to tweets.

(Credit: Twitter)

 

CNET - If you've noticed that things on your favorite big services feel a little different today, you're not imagining things. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have rolled out little changes to their main services.

Facebook added status details to its Mobile Messenger application. You can see if someone has read a message you've sent, if they're typing a reply, and what general region they are physically replying from (that one could be problematical). Apple iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger users are already accustomed to these features.

Twitter added a mouse-hover behavior to tweets on the Twitter.com site. Now when you hover over a tweet, interaction choices (Reply, Retweet, and Favorite) appear. They're not there otherwise, unless you click on the persistent "Expand" option that's on each tweet.         More

Bill Banning Employer Requests for Facebook Passwords Reaches the House

Mashable - At the end of March, we learned members of the United States Congress were looking into drafting a bill that would disallow employers from asking potential hires for private login information for their Facebook accounts. States had been instituting laws on their own, but after more and more stories came out about people feeling pressured to hand over their private information by someone in the position of giving them a job, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said enough was enough — this is something that needs to be dealt with on a national level. And now, the Social Networking Online Protection Act has made it to the House of Representatives while the Senate continues to work on its own version. Important question: Do we get to call it SNOPA? I’m going to call it SNOPA.

SNOPA was introduced on Friday by Reps. Eliot Engel (NY) and Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) and would ban employers from requiring someone to hand over their username or password to a social networking account. In case you’re keeping track of party lines, Engel and Schakowsky are Democrats, but Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina is a Republican and was also working on a draft. So, this could very well have a lot of bipartisan support. We can all agree on this: human resources should not have the right to demand to poke around in our private business.            More

Poll: Google more popular than Apple, Facebook, Twitter

ZDNet - Summary: Google has been voted the most popular technology brand in a recent poll. Apple took silver, Facebook got bronze, and Twitter didn’t get a medal. Do you agree with the results?

Google is king of tech brands. 82 percent of Americans express a favorable opinion of Google overall, and 53 percent, express a “strongly” favorable opinion of the world’s leading search engine. Meanwhile, 74 percent see Apple favorably and 37 percent are strong devotees. In the social networking space, 58 percent of Americans express an overall favorable opinion of Facebook and 34 percent do the same for Twitter.

The data comes from a poll sponsored by ABC News and Washington Post, but executed by Langer Research. The survey was conducted between March 28 and April 1, 2012, by calling a random national sample of 1,007 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points.

As you can see in the chart above, just 10 percent of Americans haven’t formed a basic opinion of Google (and 29 percent of seniors), while 14 percent have no opinion of Apple and Facebook alike. Twitter is less well known, with 31 percent unready to express an opinion of it, or 51 percent of seniors.           More

Here’s what Facebook sends the cops in response to a subpoena

ZDNet - Summary: When the authorities send a subpoena to Facebook for your account information, what do they receive? Here is a document showing the pages and pages of data Facebook hands over.

View the Document

Facebook already shares its Law Enforcement Guidelines publicly, but we’ve never actually seen the data Menlo Park sends over to the cops when it gets a formal subpoena for your profile information. Now we know. This appears to be the first time we get to see what a Facebook account report looks like.

The 71-page document is actually two documents in one. The first eight pages are the actual subpoena; the remaining 62 pages are from Facebook. Most of the pages sent over from the social networking giant consist of a single photograph, plus formal details such as the image’s caption, when the image was uploaded, by whom, and who was tagged. Other information released includes Wall posts, messages, contacts, and past activity on the site.

The document was released by the “The Boston Phoenix” as part of a lengthy feature titled “Hunting the Craigslist Killer,” which describes how an online investigation helped officials track down Philip Markoff. The man committed suicide, which meant the police didn’t care if the Facebook document was published elsewhere, after robbing two women and murdering a third.

I’ve embedded the full thing, courtesy of The Boston Phoenix, for you above. Here’s what the newspaper had to say about the release:

This document was publicly released by Boston Police as part of the case file. In other case documents, the police have clearly redacted sensitive information. And while the police were evidently comfortable releasing Markoff’s unredacted Facebook subpoena, we weren’t. Markoff may be dead, but the very-much-alive friends in his friend list were not subpoenaed, and yet their full names and Facebook ID’s were part of the document. So we took the additional step of redacting as much identifying information as we could — knowing that any redaction we performed would be imperfect, but believing that there’s a strong argument for distributing this, not only for its value in illustrating the Markoff case, but as a rare window into the shadowy process by which Facebook deals with law enforcement.

As part of the feature, the newspaper chose to release an extensive amount of evidence that was used in the case. Part of that includes the data Menlo Park sent over to the cops after receiving a subpoena for Markoff’s Facebook account.           More

Facebook’s Timeline feature is just the beginning. Here’s why timelines will soon be everywhere

Computerworld – Facebook will soon foist its new Timeline feature on users as part of its plan to update its interface.

Dictionary.com defines a timeline as “a linear representation of important events in the order in which they occurred.” The key attributes of a timeline are linearity and chronology.
Facebook‘s Timeline is a brand name — and it’s somewhat misleading.

A Twitter feed is a timeline. Google+ streams are timelines. Blogs are timelines. In fact all major social networks, RSS feed readers, blogs and microblogs offer timelines — linear representations of chronologies — as the default view.

Facebook’s branded Timeline is different from those interfaces. Among the differences in Facebook’s Timeline are the size of the items and the fact that it has two columns rather than one. It scrolls all the way down to the beginning and has other visual and functional differences.

Timeline de-emphasizes the posts of other people in favor of a highlighted emphasis on one’s own activities. “Me Time” would be a more accurate name than “Timeline.”

Facebook once did have a much more timeline-like interface. Back in 2009, it introduced “Facebook Lite,” which was truly linear. Facebook originally rolled out Facebook Lite in India to serve the segment of that population with slow Internet connections. However, people back home heard about it and decided they wanted it, so Facebook offered it as an option in the U.S.

But it didn’t last long. Without apps and pages, and with fewer and smaller ads, the Facebook Lite timeline wasn’t the cash-cow interface the company wanted.

Either way, the “timeline” idea is nothing unique to Facebook. What’s interesting is not that yet another social or content service is rolling out yet another variation on the timeline concept, but that products that never had timeline interfaces are getting them.

Newest search engine is a timeline

 

When you search for something on Google+, the default result is a timeline (as defined above).              More

Sure, Facebook Is Growing, But Apple’s Growing Faster

Think Different: The Company Growing Faster Than Facebook

Forbes - How should investors value growth?

With Facebook now in registration for an initial public offering, the question is top of mind for investors in technology stocks. Facebook generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, and a cool $1 billion in net income. If the conventional wisdom is right, and Facebook goes public with a $100 billion market cap, that makes the math easy – the company would have  a P/E of 100x trailing earnings, or if you prefer, 27x trailing revenues.

But not everyone is convinced that Facebook, astonishing as it with close to 850 million users and a rapidly growing revenue base, has done enough to be worth more than, say, Boeing ($57 billion market cap, $69 billion in revenue, $4 billion in profits), Disney ($72 billion market cap, FY September 2011 revenues of $40.9 billion and $4.8 billion in profits) or Hewlett-Packard ($58 billion market cap, FY October 2011 revenues of $127.2 billion, non-GAAP net income of $10.4 billion.)

Indeed, here’s a little conundrum for you.

While Facebook grew revenues 88% in 2011, the company actually grew a more modest 54.7% in the fourth quarter; advertising in the quarter was up 44%. On a sequential basis, revenue was up 18.5% in the fourth quarter from Q1, with advertising revenue up 18.2%; compare that with a year ago when Q4 revenues were up 56.5% sequentially, and ad revenue was up 45.6%. Succumbing to the law of large numbers already?

Now let’s do a little comparison with another well-known tech company, this one based in Cupertino, rather than Menlo Park.          More

CES 2012: Now You Can Check Facebook From Your Benz

ReadWriteWeb - In an age of smartphone addiction, you’ll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?

Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have “liked” on Facebook. The feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this spring as part of the mbrace2 telematics system, which includes cloud-based apps, traffic and navigation assistance, speech recognition and Internet browsing. mbrace also features a smartphone app, which allows drivers to send information to their vehicle before actually stepping into it.

“Now that cars have screens that are intelligent, you would expect that more and more car manufacturers will want to make those screens capable of allowing people to connect with their friends and take advantage of the social context that comes along with that,” Facebook Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing Dan Rose told Reuters.          More