Drinkaware under fire after deleting booze-consumption history of some users following relaunchOne of Britain’s leading alcohol charities has been criticised over the relaunch of its popular lifestyle app that wiped the drinking history of its users along with red-flag warnings of harmful consumption.Funded by the industry, Drinkaware promotes its alcohol consumption app to help curb excessive drinking and monitor consumption. The app, which was launched in 2014, has had more than 600,000 downloads. Continue reading...
The explosive documents from Frances Haugen have renewed calls for legislation, but actually passing it is another storyIt’s been a rocky few weeks for the company formerly known as Facebook.First came the Facebook papers, a series of blockbuster reports in the Wall Street Journal based on a cache of internal documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower. Continue reading...
The firm’s agreement to buy 100,000 cars from Elon Musk’s company could change people’s minds about EVs for goodOn Tuesday, Hertz, the car-rental firm that recently emerged from bankruptcy, announced that it had made a deal to buy 100,000 cars from Tesla for what knowledgeable sources estimate to be worth $4bn. On learning this, my first thought was that if this is what insolvency is like, please direct me to the nearest bankruptcy court. My second thought, though, was that this could be a significant moment on the road to wider adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).The reason is, as anyone who has rented conventional cars will know, is that the best way of having a realistic test drive of a vehicle is to rent one for a week or two on holiday. As Teslas become available via Hertz, many more people will have a chance to experience what an EV is like. This is important because, generally, only geeks and masochists (like this columnist) are early adopters of novel technology and normal cautious consumers regard EVs as rather exotic and peculiar, not something you’d rely on for commuting or the school run. Continue reading...
Google’s Street View helps us navigate the world, but it’s also a portal on forgotten places and secret momentsI am leaning against a wall outside my secondary school in my home town of Canterbury, waiting for my mother to pick me up. She is late, as usual. I rest my head on the stone wall, which is obsidian smooth with the occasional sharp edge. I can feel a flinty knuckle of rock pressing into the base of my skull. I shift uncomfortably in my non-regulation high heels and watch the other parents come and go. I am irritated and worried I won’t have enough time to finish my GCSE coursework that evening. And then she arrives, and I slam the car door shut with more force than is needed.Only I am no longer a sullen teenager and I am not in Canterbury. I am on my sofa in south London, walking the streets of my former home town on Google Street View. I drag and drop Pegman, the Street View icon, outside my old school. He flails for a moment before freefalling feet-first, and then I am a teenager, walking the passageways of my youth. I can feel the cold stones under my hand as I trace my palm along the wall. I spent so many afternoons waiting for my mother in this spot that it feels as if there is an imprint of me forever leaning there, a ghostlike presence for today’s students to bustle past. Continue reading...
Zuckerberg wants us to all turn our attention to a land of make-believe to distract from his PR disaster while Bezos and Musk are obsessed with leaving the planetOn Thursday Facebook announced a groundbreaking and innovative new distraction from their PR disaster. As journalists continue to pore over thousands of leaked documents that show the company is fully aware that it is degrading democratic societies, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is changing its name to Meta, has a new logo that looks like a Na’vi bending over, and is going to pivot from spreading vaccine disinformation to creating a super-lame version of Second Life.Zuckerberg promised that in the future we would all work, play and “organise surprise birthday parties” as avatars in Facebook’s virtual-reality “Metaverse”. His examples of how this might work had all the cultural awareness of a Kendall Roy social media strategy. Continue reading...
Rebrand mocked under hashtag #FacebookDead while Canadian firm’s shares get unexpected boostFacebook’s name change has been roundly mocked on social media, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Israel: Meta sounds like the Hebrew word for “dead”.As images of Facebook’s name superimposed on a tombstone were shared online, Dr Nirit Weiss-Blatt, a tech expert, wrote in a tweet directed towards Facebook’s communications team: “In Hebrew, *Meta* means *Dead*.” The author of The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication added: “The Jewish community will ridicule this name for years to come.” Meta sounds like the feminine form of the Hebrew word. Continue reading...
by Euan O'Byrne Mulligan and Jane Clinton on (#5RA4R)
Major involvement in launch of Meta could saddle it with baggage from founder’s primary ventureMark Zuckerberg’s effort to remove “negative associations” between Facebook and its parent company may be undermined by his decision to front the launch of its rebranding as Meta, experts have said.Facebook’s CEO announced the change on Thursday, revealing that the name Meta would encompass the social media network, Instagram, WhatsApp and the virtual reality brand Oculus. Continue reading...
Leaked papers detail emergency exercise that followed 2019 mass murder in New ZealandFacebook trained its artificial intelligence systems to detect and block any future attempt to livestream a shooting spree with “police/military body cams footage,” and other violent material, in the aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack.The emergency exercise – detailed in corporate papers leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen – followed the March 2019 mass murder in the New Zealand city, described internally as “a watershed moment” for the Facebook Live video service. Continue reading...
Data protection advocate Mariano delli Santi on whether we should worry about targeted advertisingWe all believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Well, a little bit. That’s according to a Norwegian professor who recently argued that conspiratorial thinking spans everything from 5G theories to believing the referee really is against your team. Mine? I think my phone is somehow listening in. How else can I explain the ads that appear for a product just as I’m talking about it? I asked Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer with data protection advocate Open Rights Group.As hills to die on go, I could do worse than “my phone is listening to me”, right?
Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Meta morphosis fills me with a deep sense of dread. And some companies are too toxic to rebrand“Facebook”. The word paints a thousand pictures, every one of them a portrait of some element of the human condition I could happily live without. Message requests from veterans in Montana that read, “Hello beautiful Lady.” A friend’s mum reposting an announcement about the increased risk of dog-napping in a town 200 miles from where she lives. Suggested posts for things I have no interest in: classic cars, muay thai and the Duchess of Cambridge. Pages where guys can share pictures of their sportfishing equipment and views on immigrants, if that also comes up. A distant relative’s attempts at winning a cottage in a staggeringly fake-looking contest. A helpful infographic about how vaccines can cause brain polyps. Engagement photoshoots. Fascism.Yet it seems we are at the end of an era. After 17 years, billions of dollars in profit and some minor controversies involving the erosion of world democracy, Facebook has changed its name. From now on, the parent company will be known as Meta, to reflect the company’s shift in focus to the next digital frontier: the metaverse (or virtual reality to non-nerds). Continue reading...
by Hannah Verdier, Hollie Richardson, Hannah J Davies on (#5R9AZ)
The Bridgerton star joins forces with Camilla Whitehill for a glorious send-up of rural Ireland. Plus: an absorbing investigation in Mississippi Goddam, and Esther Perel returnsWhistle Through the Shamrocks (from 1 Nov)
Despite posting lower than expected revenues, iPhone 13 sales nearly doubled while iPad sales grew by 21%Apple shares slid slightly on Thursday after the company announced lower than expected revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021.The company posted a quarterly revenue of $83.4bn, up 29% year over year but still short of analyst predictions of $84.85bn. Continue reading...
Share price down 4% in after-hours trading on news that third-quarter earnings fell to $3.2bn compared with $3.6bn last yearAmazon’s profits declined by the largest percentage in more than four years as the online giant said it has spent heavily on coping with the pandemic and delivered a downbeat forecast for the holiday season.The news sent Amazon’s share price down 4% in after-hours trading. Continue reading...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social media giant will change the name of its holding company to Meta, in a rebrand that comes as the company faces a series of public relations crises. Zuckerberg made the announcement at Facebook’s annual conference on Thursday, where he outlined his vision for the ‘metaverse’ – a digital world built over our own, comprising virtual reality headsets and augmented reality
by Hosted by Alyx Gorman, Steph Harmon and Michael Su on (#5R6GV)
In the second episode of Guardian Australia’s new podcast, Alyx Gorman, Michael Sun and Steph Harmon bring in Rashna Farrukh to discuss how TikTok is leaching into every corner of the internet – and the algorithms that know more about us than we do. Later in the episode: Michael gets trolled by a homeware memeShow notes: Continue reading...
Federal Communications Commission action is the latest pushback against what the US sees as infiltration by Chinese tech firmsThe US communications regulator has voted to revoke China Telecom’s licence in America over national security concerns in the latest pushback by Washington against what it deems possible infiltration of key networks by Chinese companies.The decision by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) means China Telecom Americas must now discontinue US services within 60 days. China Telecom, the largest Chinese telecommunications company, has had authorisation to provide telecommunications services for nearly 20 years in the United States. Continue reading...
Profits are strong, shares are up and its users are increasing. But the social media company is still in big troubleUh-oh, it looks as if Mark Zuckerberg has caught on to the media’s dastardly plot to destroy Facebook! As you have probably noticed, the technology behemoth has been in the news nonstop recently, as media outlets plough through thousands of pages of internal documents leaked by the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Most people might think journalists reporting revelations about one of the world’s most powerful companies was par for the course. Zuckerberg, however, seems to think it’s some sort of vast conspiracy.“My view is that what we’re seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” Zuckerberg said during an earnings call on Monday. Sounds a little Trumpy, doesn’t it? Admit no wrong; instead, cast yourself as the victim of the malicious mainstream media. Continue reading...
The company reported a 6% increase in daily active users and a revenue that grew to $29.01bn thanks to online advertisingFacebook’s profit topped $9bn during its most recent financial quarter, clearing investor predictions even as the company faces an onslaught of negative publicity over a major release of whistleblower documents.The company revealed in its Monday earnings report that it saw a 6% year-on-year increase in daily active users, reaching an average of 1.93 billion for September 2021. Its revenue grew 35% to $29.01bn, thanks to a boom in online advertising. Continue reading...
Much of the blame for the world's increasingly polarised politics lies with social networks and the radicalising effects of their services, the whistleblower Frances Haugen told MPs as she called for external regulation to reduce social harm. The company’s internal culture prioritised profitability over its impact on the wider world, said Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team
The woman whose revelations have rocked Facebook tells how spending time with her mother, a priest, motivated her to speak outThis was not Frances Haugen’s plan A. The Facebook whistleblower says she does not like being the centre of attention, but what she saw while working at Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire compelled her into action – and made her famous.“When I look at what I did, this was not my plan A. It wasn’t my plan B, it wasn’t my plan C. It was like my plan J or something,” she laughs. “No one sat me down and said ‘what I want you to do is whistleblow’.” Continue reading...
Frances Haugen says chief executive has not shown any desire to shield users from the consequences of harmful contentThe Facebook whistleblower whose revelations have tipped the social media giant into crisis has launched a stinging new criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, saying he has not shown any readiness to protect the public from the harm his company is causing.Frances Haugen told the Observer that Facebook’s founder and chief executive had not displayed a desire to run the company in a way that shields the public from the consequences of harmful content. Continue reading...
In October 2001, the music industry was riven by piracy and had no idea how to solve it. Enter Steve Jobs, whose new device created a digital music market – and made Apple into a titanIn 2001, the record business was in freefall due to digital piracy, and the best way out of this accelerating crisis came in the shape of a white device the size of a deck of cards. The iPod, launched 20 years ago this week, was also how Apple’s Steve Jobs was able to prey on a failing business in order to avenge his own past failures – exiled between 1985 and 1997 from the company he co-founded – by turning Apple into the most profitable company in history.Before the iPod lifeline arrived in October 2001, record labels were in full panic mode. In its annual report for 2001, record company trade body IFPI called it “a turbulent” year, blaming filesharing and CD burning for a revenue slump. Jay Berman was chief exective of IFPI at the time and calls the scale of filesharing then “a crisis of momentous proportions” for record labels. “It really was,” he says, “a foreign invasion.” Continue reading...
Revelations about World Doctors Alliance pages raise questions about platform’s efforts to control misinformationAn international pressure group that spread false and conspiratorial claims about Covid-19 more than doubled the average number of interactions it got on Facebook in the first six months of 2021 in spite of renewed efforts to curb misinformation on the platform, according to a report.Pages owned by the World Doctors Alliance – a group of current and former medical professionals and academics from seven countries – received 617,000 interactions in June 2021, up from 255,000 in January, according to a six-month rolling average. Continue reading...
The company’s car sales are set to overtake last year’s figures even as construction of its new Texas factory is underwayTesla saw its biggest quarterly net earnings in history, the company said on Wednesday, propelled by record electric vehicle sales last summer, amid a shortage of computer chips and other materials.The company made $1.62bn in the third quarter, beating its old record of $1.14bn, set just in the second quarter of this year. The profit was nearly five times greater than the $331m Tesla made in the same quarter in 2019. Continue reading...
Boris Johnson appeared to back idea at PMQs but sources say online harms bill may not include itGovernment sources have rowed back on Boris Johnson’s apparent commitment to criminal sanctions for tech company bosses who fail to tackle harmful or illegal content.However, the Guardian understands that the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, who has first-hand experience of online abuse, is minded to take a tougher approach on sanctions than her predecessor Oliver Dowden, though she is still taking advice. Continue reading...
Boris Johnson has promised to present the delayed online harms bill to parliament before Christmas after the killing of David Amess. He made his comments after Keir Starmer urged him to work collaboratively in clamping down on web-based extremism. Johnson also appeared to agree to another of Starmer’s requests, that the bill would include a commitment to possible criminal sanctions against tech company bosses who do not do enough to remove harmful or illegal content
As Facebook reportedly plans to unveil a new corporate name, we look at how four other firms faredFacebook is planning to rebrand with a new corporate name to reflect its shift to building the metaverse, it has been reported. According to the Verge, the announcement could be made during Facebook’s Connect conference on 28 October. Here are four other companies that recently tried rebranding, and how it went. Continue reading...
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
Technology | The Guardian