TechDayLife

By Josh Constine on Oct 4 This is sure to exacerbate fears that Facebook will further exploit Instagram now that its founders have resigned. Instagram has been spotted prototyping a new privacy setting that would allow it to share your location history with Facebook. That means your exact GPS coordinates collected by Instagram, even when you’re not using the app, would help Facebook to target you with ads and recommend you relevant content. The geo-tagged data would appear to users in their Facebook Profile’s Activity Log, which include creepy daily maps of the places you been. This commingling of data could upset users who want to limit Facebook’s surveillance of their lives. With Facebook installing its former VP of News Feed and close friend of Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri, as the head of Instagram, some critics have worried that Facebook would attempt to squeeze more value out of Instagram. Tat includes driving referral traffic to the main app via spammy notifications, in...

By Devin Coldewey on Oct 1, 2018 Another day, another announcement from Facebook that it has failed to protect your personal information. Were you one of the 50 million (and likely far more, given the company’s graduated disclosure style) users whose accounts were completely exposed by a coding error in play for more than a year? If not, don’t worry — you’ll get your turn being failed by Facebook . It’s incapable of keeping its users safe. Facebook has proven over and over again that it prioritizes its own product agenda over the safety and privacy of its users. And even if it didn’t, the nature and scale of its operations make it nearly impossible to avoid major data breaches that expose highly personal data. For one thing, the network has grown so large that its surface area is impossible to secure completely. That was certainly demonstrated Friday when it turned out that a feature rollout had let hackers essentially log in as millions of users and do who knows what....

By Russell Brandom on Oct 1, 2018 On Friday, a massive breach opened up a new front in the war on Facebook. According the the company, more than 50 million accounts were taken over by a kind of login worm, which used a series of unpublished vulnerabilities to hijack session keys on an unprecedented scale. Hackers had full access to any of the targeted accounts — essentially, they could do whatever you can do when you’re logged in — and Facebook is still working to survey the full extent of the damage. Breach response is always chaotic, but this one is particularly haphazard because of a new set of rules established by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. Implemented in May, the GDPR sets strict requirements for any breach involving EU citizens, requirements that are already guiding Facebook’s response to the session key attack. According to Facebook’s timeline, the disclosure on Friday came just before the 72-hour window for disclosing the news to privacy commissioners,...