Today Facebook finally reached a settlement with the FTC over privacy concerns that have been haunting the social media behemoth as of late.
Facebook can't just up and change its privacy settings whenever it wants to. It must now obtain express consent from its users, first.
Since the settlement, Zuckerberg has penned a blog post outlining the Facebook features that the site has launched, which include friend lists, the ability to review tags before they appear on a profile, mobile versions of privacy controls, amount other notable updates. He also announced the splitting of the Chief Privacy Officer position into two parts, to be held by Erin Egan and Michael Richter in product and policy, respectively.
In September 2009, Baltimore-based software company WhoGlue Inc. filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Facebook. It claimed that Facebook "violated a patent awarded to WhoGlue in 2007 for an information management system to control personal information as human networks and technology increasingly mesh." The lawsuit was settled, and in early November 2011, Hardebeck sold his tiny two-person company, which consists of him and a developer in Berlin, to Facebook for an undisclosed amount.
Facebook may have acquired WhoGlue, but according to a repot from The Baltimore Sun, Hardebeck bought back "some assets, trademarks and customer relationships from Facebook." He has since renamed his company WhoGlue LLC.
This year's Facebook acquisitions are just the beginning of what's in store for the social media behemoth.
The European Commission is cracking down on the way Facebook gathers information about European users. A new EC Directive will ban targeted advertising unless users specifically say they want it. This is great news for European Facebook users, especially after the case of 24-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems who, in late October, started an online campaign aimed at forcing Facebook to abide by European data privacy laws.
The real question is: Why isn't this happening in America? All 800 million Facebook users agree to let the company use their personal information.
A Facebook spam attack has just hit the Facebook Help Center's Community Forum, flooding it with fake messages about livestreaming American football games. The spam appears to have come from compromised Facebook accounts, according to reports from Sophos. The suspicious activity was first reported by the unofficial Facebook privacy and security blog, aptly titled FacebookPrivacyAndSecurity.
There is a general thought going around the Internet that by making Android open source, Google has lost control of the platform as companies like Amazon and Facebook use to source code fork to create their own devices. It has been said that Google has lost the keys to Android and it was a mistake to let anyone outside of Google-approved original equipment manufacturers build off the platform.
Has Google really lost control of Android? By forking Android to their needs, have Amazon and Facebook really taken money out of Google's pockets? Probably not. In fact, with the Kindle Fire and rumored Facebook Phone, both Facebook and Amazon may have unwittingly become platform evangelists for the Android platform.
Even though Facebook suffered social commerce fails with the Delta ticket window and the now-shuttered Facebook Deals, Facebook social shopping applications for Facebook still keep popping up.
A new study from Sociable Labs shows that 50% of shoppers are logged into Facebook while shopping on an e-commerce site. While that's interesting data in and of itself, the study does not prove any correlation between sharing on Facebook and shopping on e-commerce sites. In other words, businesses may see that their customers are on Facebook - because, really, who isn't on Facebook, save for the very paranoid - yet the idea of sharing what you buy through the world's largest social network has not, and will not, become a part of the Facebook user's experience. Unless it centers around an e-commerce site like EBay that people already know and trust.
The social web is a well reported topic within the media today, and for good reason. We are in a transitional change with how we communicate with each other online, how brands reach consumers and how organisations market to their audience. We are undoubtedly immersed in the technology age, and our lives, the way we interact with others, is changing totally.
The monumental success of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's world leading social platform, has enticed brands, consumers, investors alike, and the world is continually awaiting for that 'next big thing'. A likely reason therefore that the majority of news stories, magazine articles and blog posts on Google's latest foray into the social web repeatedly draw up comparisons to Zuckerberg's global giant.
Yesterday AllThingsD announced the launch of the Facebook phone, again. Codenamed Buffy, this Android HTC phone will feature deep Facebook integration and support for HTML5. It is expected to arrive in 12-18 months. Facebook had to do something mobile if they really want to compete with Google and Apple, right? Facebook chose Android as its platform, and Buffy as the name. Here are 5 ways Android phones are like Buffy. We're calling on all Buffy fans to add to this in the comments. Now, prepare thyself!
New research sponsored by Facebook out of a Milan computer science university shows that the old saw of there being six degrees of separation is no longer accurate. Call it 4.7 degrees instead. The researchers used a random sampling of half a million Facebook users who were active in May 2011 and mapped their social graphs.
Today, AllThingsD announced that the Facebook HTC phone is really coming. It's called Buffy, and is expected to arrive in the next 12-18 months. It is "planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications, according to sources familiar with the project."
While the Buffy news seems striking, it is actually just confirmation of Facebook's serious leap into the mobile space, which has already been in the works for more than a year.
