Facebook and Instagram owner reportedly dismisses about 24 workers for abusing $25 meal credit system Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their $25 meal credits to buy items such as toothpaste, laundry detergent and wine glasses. The tech firm, which is worth £1.2tn and also owns the messaging platform WhatsApp, is said to have dismissed workers last week after an investigation discovered staff had been abusing the system, including to send food home when they were not in the office. Continue reading...

Tech companies aren’t transparent about what they do with our photos – we asked experts about best baby-pic practices Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular risk you’re trying to protect your child against, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article. Last week’s column covered how to opt yourself out of tech companies using your posts to train artificial intelligence. You’ve got the cutest baby ever, and you want the world to know it. But you’re also worried about what might happen to your baby’s picture once you release it into the nebulous world of the internet. Should you post it? Continue reading...

Though the message has been shared by many users, including celebrities, it offers no copyright or privacy protection The “Goodbye Meta AI” message, which purports to protect the user from having the likes of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp use their accounts as an AI training camp, has become an increasingly common feature on timelines. It has been shared by actors and sports stars – including James McAvoy, Ashley Tisdale and Tom Brady – as well as hundreds of thousands of others. But why – and what effect, if any, will it have? Continue reading...

Agency accuses Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies of sharing troves of user information with third-parties Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms. The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states. Continue reading...

Stock price grew around 5%, which revealed the company outperformed analysts’ expectations for its second quarter Meta’s shares rose in after-hours trading on Wednesday off the back of a strong earnings report that comes as the company is spending heavily on AI tools. The company’s stock price grew around 5% following the report, which revealed the company outperformed analysts’ expectations for its second quarter. Continue reading...

Officials seized documents from NSO Group to try to stop handover of information about notorious hacking tool, files suggest The Israeli government took extraordinary measures to frustrate a high-stakes US lawsuit that threatened to reveal closely guarded secrets about one of the world’s most notorious hacking tools, leaked files suggest. Israeli officials seized documents about Pegasus spyware from its manufacturer, NSO Group, in an effort to prevent the company from being able to comply with demands made by WhatsApp in a US court to hand over information about the invasive technology. Continue reading...

In some constituencies – often with large Muslim populations – a parallel viral campaign focuses on emotive issues such as Gaza that rarely feature in national coverage When Keir Starmer was interviewed for the Sun’s YouTube live stream last week, only about 10,000 people tuned in to watch him pledge to get tough on illegal immigration. Under pressure to prove he would speed up deportations, the Labour leader singled out one example in particular: “At the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed because they’re not being processed.” Continue reading...