CMA says firm ‘deliberately’ refused to supply information showing it had complied with order to separate businessesFacebook has been fined £50.5m for breaching an order imposed by the UK competition regulator during its investigation into the purchase of the gif creation website Giphy.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which launched an investigation into Facebook’s $400m (£290m) takeover earlier this year, said the social networking company “deliberately” refused to supply information proving that it was complying with an initial enforcement order (IEO). Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5QXK0)
Mini model trounces competition with great camera and performance, but isn’t the best iPhone for the yearThe iPhone 13 mini takes what’s great about the full-size iPhone 13 and squeezes it into a body not much larger than the iPhone 5S without cutting back on features or power.The smallest of Apple’s 2021 lineup costs £679 ($699/A$1,199), sitting above the £389 iPhone SE and below the £779 iPhone 13. Continue reading...
Hype and the thrill of gambling are pushing inexperienced people into danger, says City watchdogSocial media hype and the gambling-like thrill of competing to get rich quick are driving younger investors to turn to cryptocurrencies, foreign exchange trading and other high-risk products, according to the City watchdog.The Financial Conduct Authority said it was seeing more people chasing high returns and was concerned that many new investors were increasingly putting money into high-risk investments which may not be right for them. Continue reading...
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor on (#5QWMS)
LightBasin hackers were able to obtain subscriber information and call metadata, says CrowdStrikeAt least 13 phone companies around the world have been compromised since 2019 by sophisticated hackers who are believed to come from China, a cybersecurity expert group has said.The roaming hackers – known as LightBasin – were able to “search and find” individual mobile phones and “target accordingly”, according to CrowdStrike, a group regularly cited by western intelligence. Continue reading...
GetGo store uses weight sensors and skeleton outlines to track shoppers, who are billed when they leaveTesco is fighting back against Amazon with its first “just walk out” store, where it is possible to buy groceries without having to scan items or visit a till.The supermarket’s GetGo store in Holborn, central London, follows a small trial of a similar store at Tesco head office in Welwyn Garden City, which has been selling goods to the retailer’s staff since 2019. Continue reading...
After six months and 15 visits by Openreach technicians BT still left us without a working connectionBack in March I placed an order with BT for “superfast enhanced” broadband for the community centre which I help run as a volunteer in Hastings.It is now almost six months on and we are no nearer to having a working broadband connection. We were upgrading from a basic TalkTalk package which was cut off in March. We have now had multiple visits from Openreach but every time that the engineer arrives on site, they have been given instructions to connect us to a street cabinet that is some distance from our property and they cannot complete the job. Ironically we have a cabinet just outside our car park, but the instructions don’t appear to allow the engineers to use that. Continue reading...
From bibliotherapy to burpees, gratitude journals to cathartic workouts, Nadine von Cohen logs into Australia’s new crop of wellbeing appsAustralians are the world’s biggest consumers of health and wellness apps, punching well above our per capita weight in our quest for peak physical and mental condition, according to research from telecommunications company Uswitch. In recent years we have also been making them – with everyone from fitness influencers to mental health advocacy groups launching digital products.I’m partial to a bit of mobile-based movement and mindfulness myself, but I have a complex relationship with wellness. While I love green juices, pilates and my “ness” being “well”, I can’t abide many contemporary uses of the word. In the diet, fitness, fashion and other industries, “wellness” can feel like a barely repackaged “weight loss”, while “healthy” has replaced “slim” as companies respond superficially to the body positivity movement without really changing their ways. Continue reading...
by Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Michael Savage on (#5QT2P)
Warning that online giant’s move will lead to higher prices and empty shelves in shopsAmazon is offering signing-up bonuses of up to £3,000 in areas of Britain with labour shortages, to attract workers in time for the Christmas surge in demand.The Food and Drink Federation says there is a “battle for labour” in the run-up to Christmas, with Amazon trying to recruit 20,000 temporary staff. Many food and hospitality firms cannot compete with the pay now being offered by the online giant and this may affect Christmas deliveries and supplies. Continue reading...
Digital activists around the world are urging Facebook to take seriously how its algorithm incites misinformation and ethnic violenceOn a cloudy evening in Nairobi, Berhan Taye is scrolling through a spreadsheet in which she has helped document more than 140 Facebook posts from Ethiopia that contain hate speech. There are videos of child abuse, texts of hate speech against different ethnic groups, and hours-long live streams inciting hatred. These posts breach Facebook community guidelines in any context. Yet for Taye and her colleagues, this is what Facebook’s news feed has looked like for years in Ethiopia.Because there aren’t enough content moderators focused on Ethiopia, it has been up to Taye, an independent researcher looking at technology’s impact on civil society, and a team of grassroots volunteers to collect and then report misinformation and hate speech to Facebook. Continue reading...
After games boom in pandemic, gangs are using phishing and malware to cheat fans out of money and reveal their personal dataPlayers of online video games such as Roblox, Fortnite and Fifa are being warned to watch out for scammers, amid concerns that gangs are targeting the platforms.Multiplayer games boomed during the pandemic lockdowns as people turned to socialising in virtual spaces. Continue reading...
Client-side scanning, as the technology is called, should really be treated like wiretapping and regulated accordinglyFor centuries, cryptography was the exclusive preserve of the state. Then, in 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman came up with a practical method for establishing a shared secret key over an authenticated (but not confidential) communications channel without using a prior shared secret. The following year, three MIT scholars – Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman – came up with the RSA algorithm (named after their initials) for implementing it. It was the beginning of public-key cryptography – at least in the public domain.From the very beginning, state authorities were not amused by this development. They were even less amused when in 1991 Phil Zimmermann created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, emails, files and other things. PGP raised the spectre of ordinary citizens – or at any rate the more geeky of them – being able to wrap their electronic communications in an envelope that not even the most powerful state could open. In fact, the US government was so enraged by Zimmermann’s work that it defined PGP as a munition, which meant that it was a crime to export it to Warsaw Pact countries. (The cold war was still relatively hot then.) Continue reading...
Beanless brews can cut deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions dramatically – but what will happen to workers in traditional coffee-growing regions?Heiko Rischer isn’t quite sure how to describe the taste of lab-grown coffee. This summer he sampled one of the first batches in the world produced from cell cultures rather than coffee beans.“To describe it is difficult but, for me, it was in between a coffee and a black tea,” said Rischer, head of plant biotechnology at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, which developed the coffee. “It depends really on the roasting grade, and this was a bit of a lighter roast, so it had a little bit more of a tea-like sensation.” Continue reading...
Although the platform bans content promoting dangerous weight loss, hashtags such as #skinnycheck can still be foundInstagram has attracted a firestorm after whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed internal research showing the platform downplayed proof of its toxic effects – including the rise of eating disorders – on children.But such issues are not limited to the Facebook-owned social media company. The Guardian has found a variety of harmful pro-anorexia hashtags remain searchable on the popular video-sharing app TikTok, where corresponding videos have billions of views combined. Continue reading...
Users can set encryption key for chats on Google Drive or iCloud to prevent authorities demanding access from providerWhatsApp is allowing users to encrypt their backed-up chats, making them unreadable without access to a password or 64-digit encryption key.Facebook, the messaging app’s owner, said from Thursday some users would be able to fully encrypt messages stored on Google Drive or Apple’s iCloud. The company said it would be introducing the feature slowly to people with the latest version of WhatsApp. Continue reading...
More than 50,000 alerts sent so far this year, including of an Iranian group that targeted a UK universityGoogle has warned of a surge in activity by government-backed hackers this year, including attacks from an Iranian group whose targets included a UK university.The search group said that so far in 2021 it had sent more than 50,000 warnings to account holders that they had been a target of government-backed phishing or malware attempts. This represents an increase of a third on the same period last year, Google said in a blogpost, with the rise attributed to an “unusually large campaign” by a Russian hacking group known as APT28, or Fancy Bear. Continue reading...
Campaigners say Face Pay, launched in over 240 stations, is ‘dangerous step’ in efforts to control populationThe Moscow metro has rolled out what authorities have lauded as the world’s first mass-scale facial recognition payment system, amid privacy concerns over the new technology.The cashless, cardless and phoneless system, named Face Pay, launched at more than 240 stations across the Russian capital on Friday. Continue reading...
After uploading her tracks online, the UK singer-producer thought the industry was a closed shop. Then she turned to TikTok ...In December, a TikTok user in London named PinkPantheress started uploading clips of a song, intending to keep at it until “someone notices”. Ten months later, the social media platform named her song Just for Me its breakout track of the summer; it has more than 20m plays on Spotify and, after being sampled by the drill rapper Central Cee, went into the UK Top Five.A flood of similarly fleeting tracks have followed: rarely lasting more than two minutes, they are mostly self-produced, lo-fi mash-ups of saccharine-sweet vocals and jungle and drum’n’bass beats. Gen Z adores her; Grimes and Charli XCX are fans; Lizzo and Charli d’Amelio, TikTok’s reigning queen, have used her music to soundtrack their own TikToks. Continue reading...
by Hannah Verdier, Hollie Richardson, Hannah J Davies on (#5QQX7)
The Flipside sees Lees explore conflicting views on themes including identity. Plus: the great British canoe con, the resurgence of natural hair, and My Therapist Ghosted MeThe Flipside
One bill would prevent platforms from giving preference to their own products, the other would remove Section 230 protectionsUS lawmakers announced two major new proposals seeking to rein in the power of big tech, days after the revelations from a former Facebook employee spotlighted the company’s sweeping impact.The first bill, proposed by a group of senators headed by Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Republican Chuck Grassley would bar big tech platforms from favoring their own products and services. Continue reading...
Captain Kirk’s profound reflection on our home planet was an ironic outcome for a trip that was meant to boost space travelThere’s nothing like a vacation to make you appreciate home.That seemed to be the sentiment behind William Shatner’s words as he returned from a brief journey to space on Wednesday. In remarks filmed after he landed, the actor described having had “the most profound experience I can imagine”. Continue reading...
by Richard Adams, Georgia Goble and Nick Bartlett on (#5QQKM)
Exclusive: UK institution was in line for huge donation but has paused talks due to concerns Gulf state used hacking softwareThe University of Cambridge has broken off talks with the United Arab Emirates over a record £400m collaboration after claims about the Gulf state’s use of controversial Pegasus hacking software, the university’s vice-chancellor has said.The proposed deal, hailed by the university in July as a “potential strategic partnership … helping to solve some of the greatest challenges facing our planet” – would have included the largest donation of its kind in the university’s history, spanning a decade and involving direct investment from the UAE of more than £310m. Continue reading...
Hope not Hate urges messaging app to act on privacy policy that ‘facilitates’ murderous contentMPs, leaders of faith communities, and groups involved in countering hate have sent a letter to Telegram urging it to take action as it emerged as an “app of choice” for racists and violent extremists.An image was projected on to Telegram’s offices in London this week by the campaign group Hope not Hate, which has organised the letter, in a move to shame the company. Continue reading...
After election humiliation and Brexit, the former UK deputy prime minister swapped Westminster for a £2.7m job in Silicon Valley. The catch? Serving as the public face of the crisis-hit companyOn Sunday, Nick Clegg did a succession of interviews with some of the US’s biggest TV news shows. In his role as Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs and communications, he was defending his company after weeks of headlines about its latest crisis – this time involving Frances Haugen, a Facebook staffer turned whistleblower who had testified days earlier before a committee of the US Senate. The story centred on a stash of company documents that Haugen had given to the Wall Street Journal. The central allegation, which Facebook vehemently denies, was that the company had ignored its own research into the harms caused by some of its products in favour of the pursuit of “astronomical profits”.Anyone au fait with the five grim years Clegg spent as the UK’s deputy prime minister would have had the familiar impression of someone emphasising his good intentions in almost impossible circumstances. His facial expression regularly expressed a sort of righteous exasperation; his words seemed to imply that if only his critics could grasp the facts, everything would quickly die down. Like any well-briefed politician, he emphasised a handful of statistics: the 40,000 content moderators Facebook employs, the $13bn (£9.5bn) it says it has spent cracking down on misinformation and hate speech; the company’s claim that the latter accounts for only five of every 10,000 Facebook posts. Continue reading...
Edwin Robbe had a troubled life, but found excitement and purpose by joining an audacious community of hackers. Then the real world caught up with his online activitiesJosé Robbe was leaving her place of work in Rotterdam when she saw a man and a woman walking towards her. It was a Tuesday afternoon, 20 March 2012. “Are you Mrs Robbe?” She nodded. The woman, who was wearing jeans and a black windcheater, explained that she was with the police. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute. It’s about your son, Edwin. We’re arresting him.” José stared, frozen. The woman asked if she would accompany them. Warily, José agreed.At the police car, the officer told her they intended to surprise her son at the family home in Barendrecht, just south of Rotterdam, and arrest him on the spot. She asked if José wanted to be there for her son’s arrest. “No,” she replied grimly. It felt as if she had just betrayed her son. To stand by and watch would make it even worse. The police asked José for her house keys and dropped her off at a plaza by the local supermarket a few blocks from her house. She felt terrible as the officers drove away to arrest her eldest child, just a troubled 17-year-old. A little while later, three officers emerged from the house, escorting Edwin between them. He offered no resistance. Continue reading...
Industry’s huge use of electricity could present an awkward question for Joe Biden ahead of the Cop26 climate talksThe United States has overtaken China to account for the largest share of the world’s bitcoin mining, according to data published by researchers at Cambridge University.The figures demonstrate the impact of a crackdown on bitcoin trading and mining launched by the Chinese government in late May, which devastated the industry and caused miners to shut up shop or move overseas. Continue reading...
The company, under wide-ranging scrutiny for harms linked to its platforms, increased protections against harassment and bullyingFacebook will count activists and journalists as “involuntary” public figures and increase protections against harassment and bullying targeted at these groups, its global safety chief said in an interview this week.The social media company, which allows more critical commentary of public figures than of private individuals, is changing its approach on the harassment of journalists and “human rights defenders”, who it says are in the public eye due to their work rather than their public personas. Continue reading...
Inside the notoriously insular company, employees’ perceptions of Haugen appear to be dividedWhen former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the Senate last Tuesday, she painted an unsightly picture of the social networking company.As a member of the company’s civic misinformation team for almost two years until her departure in May, Haugen shared insights the company had previously hidden – from Facebook’s willingness to propagate hateful content on its platforms to keep users engaged to research proving Instagram’s detrimental effects on teen girls’ mental health – and leaked thousands of pages of internal documents backing up her claims. Continue reading...
Sir Jon Cunliffe likens danger to 2008 crash and calls for tough regulation of cryptocurrenciesA senior Bank of England policymaker has warned that digital currencies such as bitcoin could trigger a financial meltdown unless governments step forward with tough regulations.Likening the growth of cryptocurrencies to the spiralling value of US sub-prime mortgages before the 2008 financial crash, the deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe said there was danger financial markets could be rocked in a few years by an event of similar magnitude. Continue reading...
Shares in Apple fall as global chip shortage and supply chain issues prompt White House to admit there could be empty shelves during festive seasonApple may slash the number of iPhone 13s it will make this year by up to 10m because of a shortage of computer chips amid a worldwide supply chain crunch that led the White House to warn that “there will be things that people can’t get” at Christmas.Apple was expected to produce 90m units of the new iPhone models this year but has told its manufacturers that the number would be lower because chip suppliers including Broadcom and Texas Instruments were struggling to deliver components, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Continue reading...
Mothers describe their daughters’ dangerous experiences after whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimonyEarly in the Covid-19 pandemic, Michelle noticed her teenage daughters were spending substantially more time on Instagram.The girls were feeling isolated and bored during lockdown, the Arizona mom, who has asked to be identified by her first name to maintain her children’s privacy, recalled. She hoped social media could be a way for them to remain connected with their friends and community. Continue reading...
Round-the-clock surveillance of students’ accounts raises tricky privacy concerns. And do they really help keep kids safe?In the midst of a pandemic and a national uprising, Teeth Logsdon-Wallace was kept awake at night last summer by the constant sounds of helicopters and sirens.For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis, who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplified the emotional distress he was experiencing as a result of gender dysphoria. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after he tried to kill himself. During that dark stretch, he spent his days in an outpatient psychiatric facility, where he listened to a punk song on loop that promised things would soon “get better”. Eventually they did. Continue reading...
TikTok | Children’s books | Child refugees | Travelling fairs | DuelsIt isn’t TikTok that’s letting kids see inappropriate posts, it’s their parents (Revealed: anti-vaccine TikTok videos being viewed by children as young as nine, 8 October). There are controls that can stop young people signing up; it’s up to their parents and guardians to use them. I suggest a “revert to defaults” on kids’ devices once a day, or as often as necessary. Then get TikTok to deal with the liars. Take back control, people!
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor on (#5QKKX)
Lindy Cameron, head of National Cyber Security Centre, says extortion is most serious online threat to UKCybercriminals from Russia and neighbouring states are behind the majority of online extortion conducted against businesses and other organisations in Britain, according to the chief of the UK’s cybersecurity agency.Lindy Cameron, the chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said ransomware “presents the most immediate danger” of all cyber threats faced by the UK, in a speech to the Chatham House thinktank. Continue reading...
According to one survey, 81% of teachers in America said their schools monitor devices. Students are not always awareWhen the pandemic started last year, countless forms of inequality were exposed – including the millions of American families who don’t have access to laptops or broadband internet. After some delays, schools across the country jumped into action and distributed technology to allow students to learn remotely. The catch? They ended up spying on students. “For their own good”, of course.According to recent research by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), “86% of teachers reported that, during the pandemic, schools provided tablets, laptops, or Chromebooks to students at twice the rate (43%) prior to the pandemic, an illustration of schools’ attempts to close disparities in digital access.”Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnistIn the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org Continue reading...
Corinne and Luke, both 31, met online in August 2013 when they bonded over a video game. They now live together in LondonIn August 2013, Corinne was living with her family in north London and working in a dull admin job. “I was playing a lot of video games as an escape,” she says. One day, she was recruited by friends to try a new game with a group of others online. She wasn’t told how it worked and quickly became lost, but got talking to Luke, an American who was struggling with the same game. “While everyone else was slaying dragons, we started talking on voice chat,” he says. They couldn’t see each other’s faces, but Luke liked her accent.They continued to talk during online gaming sessions and spoke regularly about Luke’s love for British comedy panel shows. “I was living in New York with my family and I was curious about what life was like in the UK. I had a lot of questions,” says Luke, laughing. They built an online friendship, but it wasn’t until the following March that they began to speak on other platforms. Continue reading...
by Jenessa Williams, Justine Jordan, Keza MacDonald, on (#5QK9K)
Heartbreak is the ailment, could culture be the cure? Our critics’ suggestions to help ease your pain – or channel your angstThe best method for getting through a breakup is watching Marc Webb’s movie (500) Days of Summer, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets dumped by the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl Zooey Deschanel. For all its faults, this film has a killer rejection scene; it’s so painful, especially for a man, that it should lance the boil of emotional pain all by itself. Gordon-Levitt stars as Tom, who shows up for a party to which he has been diplomatically invited by his now ex-girlfriend Summer. The poor dope is somehow hoping against hope that the old magic will be rekindled. The party is cleverly split on the screen between “Expectations” and “Reality”: on the left we see his fantasy that they will start canoodling, on the right, the horrible reality of her distant, if polite interactions with him. Pure agony. Peter Bradshaw Continue reading...
Modern video games now exist in a bewildering mass of interconnected genres and sub-genres: here’s your guide to the most interestingThis term is a portmanteau derived from two beloved games that arrived on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the mid-1980s, Metroid and Castlevania, and is usually applied to 2D games in which the world is explorable in all directions (as opposed to classic platform games, in which you go from left to right). There are usually secret rooms and areas that can only be accessed once you’ve found some key or item later on, so players have to mentally map their progress and backtrack when necessary. In this way a good metroidvania world is like a story, with tension, foreshadowing, plants, payoffs and surprise reveals built into the very foundations. Continue reading...
Failure to ensure women have equal access to the internet hampering developing economies and fuelling gender inequalityA failure to ensure women have equal access to the internet has cost low-income countries $1tn (£730bn) over the past decade and could mean an additional loss of $500bn by 2025 if governments don’t take action, according to new research.Last year, governments in 32 countries, including India, Egypt and Nigeria, lost an estimated $126bn in gross domestic product because women were unable to contribute to the digital economy. Continue reading...
The site rejected my request to pay for new locks and refused to discuss it furtherCan you please ask Airbnb how it allowed a fraudster to stay in my house and steal my speakers and keys? I rent out my home in east London whenever I go back to Ireland to visit family. In July I accepted a request from a woman called Clare who had a verified profile and past reviews, and all seemed well. The keys were left in the lockbox as usual, the guests checked themselves in – and then threw a house party. When I returned I found my £600 speakers were gone along with the house keys. I had to spend £400 replacing the locks.Airbnb rejected my request for reimbursement and refused to discuss it further. However, after I tracked down Clare, it emerged that her account had been taken over fraudulently, and that Airbnb had been made aware of this fact on the day of the booking by her credit card company, Barclaycard. Continue reading...
State reports 1,612 new local coronavirus cases and eight deaths amid testing of updated phone appAbout 70,000 Victorians have downloaded the updated Service Victoria app as the state pushes ahead with regional trials for the vaccinated economy.The smartphone app allows Victorians to view and download vaccine certificates for the double jabbed, which can be scanned alongside QR code check-ins at venues. Continue reading...
Demand for capacity grows on back of hit Netflix shows, online games and moreThe breakout success of the South Korean drama Squid Game has prompted a local broadband provider to launch legal action to force the maker, Netflix, to help pay for the huge surge in traffic, the latest flashpoint in the argument over who should carry the burden of the spiralling costs of data fuelled by the global streaming boom.From Netflix’s latest global sensation and livestreamed Premier League football matches on Amazon Prime Video, to bandwidth-busting traffic when hit online games such as Fortnite or Call of Duty are updated, the demand for internet capacity has undergone unprecedented growth in recent years. Continue reading...
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsI imagine that a couple of hundred years ago the idea of recording and playing back audio or video was as ridiculous as the idea seems now of recording and playing back odours. So why have we made so much progress at the first but none at the second? Peter Keyston, Newton BlossomvilleSend new questions to nq@theguardian.com. Continue reading...
Teenage boys’ easy access to violent sexual images is creating a crisis for them – and for women, argues the anti-porn campaignerViolence against women is never far from the news, but currently it is high on the agenda – and porn features again and again as a factor. From the murder of Sarah Everard to the paltry sentence handed down to Sam Pybus, the latest man to use the so-called “rough sex defence”, it seems the world is riven with misogyny.Sarah’s killer Wayne Couzens was attracted to “brutal sexual pornography”, the court heard during his trial. Pybus – who was sentenced to four years and eight months last month for manslaughter after strangling a vulnerable woman during sex – was also known to use violent porn. Tackling porn culture is clearly a key part of tackling sexual violence towards women. I have campaigned to end the sex trade for decades, and am well aware of its role in the sexual exploitation of women. Continue reading...
Scientist Philip Jones is resigned, but ready for a fresh wave of abuse when drama The Trick tries to put the record straight on accusations that he falsified data on global heatingTwelve years ago, Professor Philip Jones was subject to a barrage of hate mail and death threats that pushed him close to suicide. Emails, hacked from his laboratory, proved climate change research was a fraud, it was claimed.Now Jones faces a repeat of that grim onslaught when the BBC One film, The Trick, is screened on 18 October. It will tell the story, sympathetically, of his tribulations at the hands of climate change deniers. Continue reading...
In her explosive Senate testimony, the former employee exposed how the tech giant puts profit before the public goodThe journey from disillusioned ex-employee to modern-day heroine took Frances Haugen less than five months. The 37-year-old logged out of Facebook’s company network for the last time in May and last week was being publicly lauded a “21st-century American hero” on Washington’s Capitol Hill.That journey was paved with tens of thousands of internal documents, taken from Facebook’s internal system by Haugen, that formed the backbone of a series of damning revelations first published in the Wall Street Journal last month. They revealed that Facebook knew its products were damaging the mental health of teenage girls, resisted changes that would make the content of its main platform less divisive and knew its main platform was being used to incite ethnic violence in Ethiopia. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian