Attaullah Baig, WhatsApp’s former head of security, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Facebook deliberately failed to fix a bunch of security flaws, in violation of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. > The lawsuit, alleging violations of the whistleblower protection provision of > the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002, said that in 2022, roughly 100,000 > WhatsApp users had their accounts hacked every day. By last year, the > complaint alleged, as many as 400,000 WhatsApp users were getting locked out > of their accounts each day as a result of such account takeovers...

Zuckerberg annuncia la "svolta" di Meta: un allineamento completo alla retorica di Trump e alle modalità di X. Spariscono il fact checking, via libera all'ulteriore attacco all'identità razziali, di genere e sessuali. Il governo italiano invece cerca accordi con Musk per Starlink: si parla di cifre spaziali per l'utilizzo dei satelliti di Starlink da parte dell'esercito italiano. La mossa unisce 3 obiettivi: fare un favore all'amico; procedere con la politica bellicista; colpire il progetto europeo di un sistema satellitare simile a Starlink per gestire in proprio una simile infrastruttura militare. Notiziole: * la legge francese sull'amministrazione illecita di piattaforme online utilizzata per il sito di chat Coco.fr, noto per essere stato usato come piattaforma di comunicazione per gli stupri di Mazan; quanto si può estendere l'uso di una legge del genere? * Google fa finta che Chromium non sia suo, ma un progetto open source a cui Google aderisce. La Linux Foundation facilita l'operazione. Ascolta la trasmissione sul sito di Radio Onda Rossa

Ultimo atto di una strategia di avvicinamento a Donald Trump, ma anche punto finale del distanziamento di Meta dalla stagione “liberal” aperta nel 2016. La decisione avrà riflessi sulle organizzazioni giornalistiche che si occupavano di verificare le notizie Meta chiude il suo programma di fact-checking e punta a sostituirlo con un sistema di “note della comunità” simile a quello introdotto sul social concorrente X, di proprietà di Elon Musk. È un passo definitivo per l’azienda di Mark Zuckerberg, che rivoluziona l’approccio del gruppo che possiede i social Facebook, Instagram e Threads e la app di messaggistica Whatsapp rispetto all’informazione e ai media tradizionali. Il Ceo di Meta lo ha annunciato di persona martedì in un video su Facebook. Nel suo discorso fa esplicito riferimento al mutato panorama politico e sociale, e parlando del desiderio di abbracciare “la libertà di parola”, ossia il free speech che è diventato lo slogan di Elon Musk dopo l’acquisto della piattaforma Twitter, oggi rinominata X. Ma cita anche i “troppi errori” commessi dal sistema di moderazione dei contenuti di Meta e in particolare gli scandali scoppiati durante le elezioni presidenziali Usa. Leggi tutto

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.” > Even as the incoming president threatens news outlets, Zuckerberg gave Trump a > specific shoutout. In his pre-recorded video and in his Threads post, Zuckerberg said the company planned to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He pledged to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.” In a particularly curious detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”  Zuckerberg also gave Trump a specific shoutout in his Threads announcement, writing that the company will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” Even as the incoming president and his allies threaten news outlets, the United States, Zuckerberg argued, “has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.” The New York Times reported Tuesday that incoming Trump administration officials were given a heads-up about the new policies before they were announced. As they were being rolled out, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, sat for an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends. Kaplan called the new setup “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.” The third-party fact-checking system, Kaplan told the beaming Fox hosts, “had too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, and how.” Kaplan added that people want to “discuss and debate” topics like “ immigration, trans issues [and] gender.”  “If you can say it on TV, you can say on the floor of Congress,” Kaplan said, “you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.”  Since the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic abated, social media companies have shown a strong desire to stop policing disinformation on their platforms. Under Elon Musk, Twitter rolled back its Covid misinformation policy in 2022, and then followed up by establishing a laissez faire attitude towards both general disinformation and hate speech. Meta conducted mass layoffs in May of 2023 that gutted the teams responsible for stemming disinformation and hate speech. Trump himself was, of course, banned from Facebook and Instagram for two years following the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; his accounts were reinstated in 2023, with the company promising “new guardrails to deter repeat offenses.”  Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Meta announced that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a round of Big Tech companies who are doing the same.

A oltre 140 moderatori di contenuti di Facebook è stato diagnosticato un disturbo post traumatico, causato dall’esposizione prolungata a immagini e video di omicidi, suicidi, abusi sessuali su minori e affini. A rivelarlo è il Guardian, che ha precisato che i moderatori in questione hanno lavorato tra le 8 e le 10 ore al giorno nella struttura di Samasource in Kenya, una società esterna che si è occupata di gestire l’attività di moderazione per conto di Meta, utilizzando per lo più collaboratori provenienti dall’Africa. “Le prove sono indiscutibili: moderare Facebook è un lavoro pericoloso che provoca un disturbo da stress post traumatico per tutta la vita a quasi tutti coloro che lo fanno”, ha dichiarato al Guardian Martha Dark, fondatrice di un’organizzazione britannica non a scopo di lucro che sta seguendo il caso dei moderatori kenioti. Ma Meta non ha rilasciato alcun commento al riguardo. Link all'articolo qui

L'Alta Corte dell'Unione Europea ha emesso una sentenza che limita l'uso dei dati personali degli utenti da parte di Meta e altre piattaforme social per scopi pubblicitari. La decisione, in linea con un parere precedente di un consulente della corte, impone restrizioni sulla durata della conservazione delle informazioni personali per il targeting degli annunci. La sentenza fa riferimento al Regolamento Generale sulla Protezione dei Dati (GDPR) dell'UE, istituito nel 2018. In particolare, si basa sul Recital 65 del GDPR, che stabilisce il "diritto all'oblio" e il diritto alla rettifica e cancellazione dei dati personali. La mancata conformità al GDPR potrebbe comportare sanzioni fino al 4% del fatturato annuo globale, cifra che per colossi come Meta potrebbe ammontare a miliardi di euro. Link all'articolo qui

If Project 2025 becomes a reality under a second Trump term, there are several ways it plans to further restrict and surveil abortion access nationwide, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills and forcing states to turn over abortion data to the federal government. Many of these proposals have received wide media coverage thanks in part to Democrats’ aggressive campaigning on Project 2025. But there has been far less attention on how major technology companies—which have increasingly helped people access abortions across state lines in light of bans nationwide—could play a role. In fact, some warn that tech would be key to implementing Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals. Advocates are now working to preemptively thwart such cooperation. Last week, 15 civil liberties groups sent a letter to the CEOs of eight of the biggest tech companies—including Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, among others—demanding they explain how they would protect users’ data and privacy, as well as combat abortion-related misinformation on their platforms if Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations were set in motion. “As written, Project 2025 would rely heavily on your companies to further its extreme agenda,” states the letter, which Mother Jones is the first to report. The signatories—which include Accountable Tech, GLAAD, and The Tech Oversight Project—warn that Project 2025’s anti-abortion policies would lead to “heightened surveillance and an increase in the trend of law enforcement using criminal subpoenas to weaponize the consumer data your companies collect and store.”  Many of these concerns have already been realized. Last year, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison after Meta gave law enforcement the Facebook messages in which she and her pregnant teenage daughter—who was reportedly past the state’s then-20-week gestational limit (that has since been further restricted to 12 weeks)—discussed obtaining abortion pills and disposing of “the evidence.” Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office in February accused a data broker of allegedly tracking visits to almost 600 Planned Parenthood locations nationwide and then selling that information to anti-abortion advertisers. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say tech platforms have censored their initiatives. All this, advocates say, makes it critical that tech companies prepare for how they could be deputized to criminalize abortion-seekers if Trump is reelected in November. “These companies are already mechanized to be the stewards of a nightmarish plan like Project 2025,” Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group focused on digital rights, told me.  I spoke with Barnett over Zoom this week to discuss how abortion rights advocates can better protect themselves and their privacy online and how tech platforms could protect users in another Trump era.  This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.  What kind of failures or inadequacies have you seen from some of these tech platforms in terms of protecting users’ privacy and data relating to abortion?  There are a lot of passive surveillance technologies, like ad tracking technologies that collect browsing data on people that can be combined with other personally identifiable information and used against people. We have examples of commercial platforms like Google Search and Facebook Messenger used to actually criminalize women in different cases, either for their own pregnancy outcomes or, in the case of Facebook Messenger logs, a woman helping her daughter navigate self-managed abortion. So these communication platforms or these messaging features on social media apps that aren’t employing good privacy and security practices are suddenly dangerous to people, and I think the tech industry at large has yet to realize how culpable they are. > We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.  Can you say more about what sort of digital threats or barriers abortion seekers are facing now, even without Project 2025 being in place? I tend to break it down into three distinct threat models that people need to be aware of: people navigating healthcare and trying to seek abortion; their allies and advocates; and healthcare workers. There’s digital evidence being used in abortion-related cases, so these [social media companies] that don’t think of themselves as culpable in abortion access can still be used against people when they have bad privacy. I also think of doxxing. Healthcare workers, especially, those whose information is subject to public records requests and FOIA, information could be used against them if they’re in reproductive healthcare. There are data brokers—which is an unregulated, vampiric nightmare industry that needs to be curtailed yesterday—that are constantly being weaponized against people. It contributes so much to the amount of data that can be collated and collected and used against people to create these vastly sophisticated portraits of who you are, what you’re doing online.  One example I think of with data brokers is [Sen. Wyden’s investigation]. That’s just an example of what happens when you have this unregulated industry that every tech company contributes to because it generates profit for them. If there were a federal ban on abortion and abortion medications were suddenly outlawed, the surveillance of the mail service or of services that distribute medications like that would be under a newly focused threat of surveillance. Basically every aspect of our lives could potentially be used against us, depending on where we are in the abortion access struggle. > Tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are > connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect > everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants > it—including law enforcement.  If Project 2025 were implemented under another Trump term, what would it actually look like in practice for some of these platforms to be involved with carrying out some of its anti-abortion aims? As long as these tech companies have piss poor privacy and security policies—specifically privacy policies—around user data, ad tracking and collection, behavioral tracking of users’ data, they are already mechanized for some really dystopic consequences—Project 2025 or not. We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.  In the meantime, users have to fight for themselves to keep their information and their dignity and safety intact. As long as communication platforms and messaging features on social media apps— as long as the status quo is not to have good data retention or to not have end-to-end encryption—all of those records are subject to law enforcement requests to enter subpoena, and that will impact users’ safety. We already have examples of this, quite literally, in criminal evidence, so it will only increase in that potential landscape. What are some of the concrete ways that tech companies can and should bolster privacy and data protection for abortion seekers now and under another potential Trump administration? I’m glad you asked this; this is the most important thing. I think tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it, including law enforcement.  Everyone needs to take their position seriously in the tech industry. That can start with better data retention policies. You need to have solid encryption at rest so that when law enforcement comes knocking, if you do have anything to hand over, you can be compliant without actually handing over anything that’s useful to the criminal investigations. But also, you can just delete old data. Having good encryption is great, but if you have really good deleting policies, deleting anything that isn’t absolutely essential to operations, that keeps you safe from both law enforcement requests and subpoena, but also data breaches—that’s huge.  Another big thing: stop tracking users on web and mobile platforms. The ad industry is corrupt, and users are wisening up to it. People are already more likely to choose platforms that respect their privacy now, because the overall understanding of privacy is normalized, thankfully, and now that we have a better understanding of how dangerous the data broker industry is, it’s imperative that tech companies do better for people. Lastly, I would say all of these policies—data retention, not ad tracking, users, etc.—[companies have to] make these things transparent. You need to make it known that you’re a privacy-first alternative to the otherwise dangerous status quo, How can abortion seekers protect their data and privacy online now, particularly if they are living in states with abortion bans? Step one is definitely threat modeling. You have to take a serious point of view about what activities you’re up to, who you are in the space, and the risky behaviors or communications or aspects of your life that need to be compartmentalized away from other things. From there, you can begin to take some more meaningful approaches—like compartmentalizing that data, so maybe having multiple browsers and saving a privacy-forward browser like Tor, or maybe Brave, or Firefox with some settings turned up on it, as opposed to a more privacy-invasive one like Chrome.  Knowing when to compartmentalize sensitive communications to a more privacy focused platform [is also important]—so moving off of social media chat applications and onto end-to-end encrypted ones. Knowing how to attend protests safely; knowing what to look for if you’re on the ground and you’re escorting people to and from clinics; getting to know automatic license plate readers; getting to know how your device might be tracked. There’s a litany of measures people can take to protect themselves. Go learn more at Surveillance Self-Defense, where we have a bunch of different educational resources for people to look at.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.” The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works. It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed. Like a lot of unfathomably wealthy people who have the resources to harvest their own beef, Zuckerberg now reportedly considers himself a “libertarian.” He has spent a lot of time in recent years attempting to cultivate a personal brand as a sort of happy-go-lucky #GirlDad. His new politics are not as ominous or viscerally off-putting as the red-pilled divorced energy of Elon Musk. But they are a politics. Deciding that you no longer want to advocate for a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform is as political as the act of advocating for it was. Responding to years of conspiracy theories and personal attacks from conservative politicians by cultivating closer relationships with them is a political tactic. According to the report, Zuckerberg twice talked to Donald Trump by phone this summer, while his new Republican political attache has sought to reassure the ex-president that Zuckerberg has no plans to spend money shoring up election infrastructure this year. It does not really get more political than a pleasant phone call with a man who tried a coup. Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview. In that sense, at least, he and Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a “digital public square” where you can find everything but reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech—including criticism of him. The truth is there is no such thing as an apolitical oligarch. Zuckerberg’s fortune came from a monopolistic enterprise that’s been used to foment ethnic cleansing and collectively unlearn a century-and-a-half of germ theory. His wealth is sustained and protected by political structures, and his spending and strategic priorities can make or break communities, newsrooms, and democratic norms. When he puts his foot down, you notice it. But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.