This Week in Tech – 03/25/2018: Facebook Scraped Call, Text Message Data for Years From Android Phones
Facebook Scraped Call, Text Message Data for Years From Android Phones
This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years’ worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received…
MPs Formally Request Zuckerberg Answer Questions
Mark Zuckerberg has been sent a formal request to appear before MPs and answer questions regarding a growing scandal about user data…
Facebook Just Lost More Than Tesla’s Entire Market Cap in Two Days
The social media giant has lost over $60 billion in market value over the past two days, following revelations that personal data of millions of users was obtained by a data analytics firm. That’s more than the market capitalization of Tesla Inc. at around $52 billion or three times that of Snapchat owner Snap Inc. at about $19 billion…
Google Chrome’s Next Update Will Finally Block Autoplay Videos That Have Sound
Google is finally getting serious about blocking annoying autoplay videos that start with the sound blaring. The next update to Chrome (version 66) will include changes to autoplay videos that mean the browser will only play them automatically if the sound isn’t playing by default, or if you click and interact with the site, or have previously “shown an interest in media on the site.”…
Silicon Valley Could Help the Last People You’d Expect — and Elon Musk Has Given $15 Million to a Contest That Will Prove It
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been funding one of the current contests, the $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE, since 2014, and its winner will be announced in April 2019. Diamandis explained to us that it is an ideal example of how the private sector can tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges, like the prize’s goal of finding an elegantly simple and cost-effective way of wiping out illiteracy, a condition that Musk called “the wellspring of poverty.”…
‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer
Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft…
Leaked: Cambridge Analytica’s Blueprint for Trump Victory
The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian…