Security News
The lawsuit - one of more than 400 filed against tech companies big and small in the past five years, by one law firm's count - alleges that Facebook broke Illinois' strict biometric privacy law that allows people to sue companies that fail to get consent before harvesting consumers' data, including through facial and fingerprint scanning. "We're going to see a lot of constituents saying, 'Why not me?'" said Jay Edelson, a Chicago attorney whose firm first sued Facebook for allegedly breaking Illinois' law.
Over the course of 2019, Facebook paid security researchers a total of $2.2 million in rewards for vulnerability reports submitted to the social media platform's bug bounty program. For comparison, the social platform paid more than $1.1 million for over 700 valid reports submitted to its bug bounty program in 2018, and more than $880,000 for over 400 valid reports in 2017.
We urge you to recognize and accept that an increased risk of child abuse being facilitated on or by Facebook is not a reasonable trade-off to make. The NSPCC said in December 2019 that police in the UK recorded over 4,000 instances - an average of 11 per day - where Facebook apps were used in child abuse image and online child sexual offenses during the prior year.
A group of hackers called OurMine hijacked some of Facebook's official Twitter and Instagram accounts over the weekend through a third-party social media management service. The hackers briefly hijacked the Twitter accounts of Facebook and its Messenger application, and the Instagram accounts of Facebook and Facebook Messenger.
Canada's privacy commissioner is taking Facebook to court to try to force the social network to make changes to its privacy practices. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has filed an application asking a federal court to declare that Facebook violated the country's privacy law over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
FACEBOOK HACKED. An otherwise slow Friday afternoon has been spiced up by a hacker crew that managed to temporarily take control of Facebook's official Twitter account. Exposed details included name, address, phone number, date of birth, Social Security number, and Medicaid ID number.
A few weeks ago, Twitter told Clearview to stop collecting its data and to delete whatever it's got. Facebook has also demanded that Clearview stop scraping photos because the action violates its policies, and now Google and YouTube are likewise telling the audacious startup to stop violating their policies against data scraping.
Neural networks are a type of machine learning that involves using a large set of training data to devise rules that can be used to identify future patterns. To detect if training sets have used Facebook images, a team of the company's researchers has proposed building a system that can be used to find out.
Europe's physics lab CERN on Wednesday said it had stopped using a Facebook team-chat application because of concerns about handing over data to the US tech giant. CERN said it had wound up its Facebook Workplace account on January 31 after the US firm gave it the choice of either paying to use the service or sharing data.
Seven months after a crack formed in the keep-the-kids-safe bubble of Facebook's Messenger Kids chat app, it's beefing up the app's Parent Dashboard with new tools and letting parents read their kids' chat histories, see the most recent videos and photos they sent or received, and delete any content they find objectionable. Facebook is pulling kids into that "What are you doing with my data?" conversation: it's developed an in-app activity that educates them on what other people can see about them, such as that people they know may see their name and photo and that parents can see and download their messaging content.