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Facebook is reportedly unable to identify where most of its user data is located, or how it is used, after it is collected, according to a leaked internal document penned by privacy engineers at Facebook last year. The team, which builds and maintains Facebook's advertisement system — the heart of the company's business model, has flagged “data lineage” issues with how user data is handled. The report raises questions of whether Facebook will be able to comply with inbound privacy regulations from various regions around…

Reddit is giving new wings to the dreams of several projects and creators with the introduction of a community fund. In an official announcement on Monday, Reddit said that it's setting up a new initiative called Community Funds with an initial investment of $1 million (roughly Rs. 7.6 crore) to support a range of projects. The new fund is a result of experiments and efforts over the last six months. The social news aggregation, Web content rating, and discussion website will begin accepting projects, events, and contest…

Facebook owner Meta started its appeal on Monday against Britain's ruling that it must sell Giphy, arguing the fact that rival Snap offered far less to buy the animated-images provider undermined the rationale used to block the deal.Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) last year ordered Meta to sell Giphy, which it had acquired in 2020.It said the deal removed a potential competitor in display advertising, based on the possibility that Giphy's fledgling ads, or "paid alignment", business could become…

Meta is set to open its first physical store where shoppers can try out and buy virtual reality headsets and other gadgets as the company plots a course to take its highly touted metaverse mainstream.The 1,550-square feet Meta Store at the company's Burlingame campus in California opens on May 9, and will feature demos for its Quest 2 VR headset and video calling device Portal, as well as smart glasses it produces with Ray-Ban, Meta said on Monday.The devices, except for the Ray-Ban glasses, will be available for purchase…

Facebook owner Meta gave user information to hackers who pretended to be law enforcement officials last year, a company source said on Wednesday, highlighting the risks of a measure used in urgent cases.Imposters were able to get details like physical addresses or phone numbers in response to falsified "emergency data requests," which can slip past privacy barriers, said the source who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.Criminal hackers have been compromising email accounts or websites tied to police…

Content identified as misleading or problematic were mistakenly prioritised in users' Facebook feeds recently, thanks to a software bug that took six months to fix, according to tech site The Verge.Facebook disputed the report, which was published Thursday, saying that it "vastly overstated what this bug was because ultimately it had no meaningful, long-term impact on problematic content," according to Joe Osborne, a spokesman for parent company Meta.But the bug was serious enough for a group of Facebook employees to…

Twitter said on Tuesday it will not recommend Russian government accounts to users as part of a rule change affecting accounts run by states which limit access to the open internet and are engaged in armed interstate conflict.The social media company also said it would now require the removal of posts depicting prisoners of war posted by government or state-affiliated media accounts. Ukraine's government has posted content featuring prisoners of war on social media in recent weeks.Russia has battled big tech companies to…

Facebook is adding a 'Sharing to Reels' feature to provide more creative options to the Reels experience. The new functionality allows users to share videos directly from third-party apps to their Facebook accounts. With this feature, instead of downloading video content and uploading it later from non-Meta apps, users can create short videos on integrated third-party apps, and post Reels clips directly from the apps with the tap of a button. Music apps Smule, and video editing apps Vita and VivaVideo are the initial…

Social media has become a primary source of information for news-hungry audiences around the world trying to make sense of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, it's being used by the governments of Russia and Ukraine to set the agenda for wider media reporting.Official Russian government accounts have been found to be amplifying pro-Russia disinformation on Twitter. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has taken to the platform to appeal to its two million followers for support.Information warfare is no…

The war in Ukraine has rapidly positioned TikTok as the number one source of misinformation thanks to its gigantic number of users and minimal filtering of content, experts say.Every day, Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist with the BBC's disinformation team, ploughs through a hallucinatory mix of fake and misleading information about the war being spewed out on the video-sharing site."TikTok is really not having a good war," he told AFP."I haven't seen another platform with so much false content," he added."We've seen it…