TailerFan

Facebook has taken upon itself to notify all the 87 million victims of Cambridge Analytica Scandal, whose data may have been leaked by creating a link at the top of their News Feed. In case you haven’t been able to spot the link at the top of your News Feed, you can visit  this link  and check if your data was passed on to Cambridge Analytica in one way or the other. Fortunately, I got this: “Based on our available records, neither you nor your friends logged into “This Is Your Digital Life.” Starting from April 9, users will be able to a see a link titled “Protecting Your Information” on their News Feed. Here, you can find out which apps are connected to your Facebook feed and what kind of information you have shared with those apps. In case you no longer use an app or wish to stop sharing data with them, Facebook will provide you the option to disable those apps and completely remove third-party access. Moreover, users whose data was leaked to Cambridge Analytica wil...

By Josh Constine on Oct 4 This is sure to exacerbate fears that Facebook will further exploit Instagram now that its founders have resigned. Instagram has been spotted prototyping a new privacy setting that would allow it to share your location history with Facebook. That means your exact GPS coordinates collected by Instagram, even when you’re not using the app, would help Facebook to target you with ads and recommend you relevant content. The geo-tagged data would appear to users in their Facebook Profile’s Activity Log, which include creepy daily maps of the places you been. This commingling of data could upset users who want to limit Facebook’s surveillance of their lives. With Facebook installing its former VP of News Feed and close friend of Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri, as the head of Instagram, some critics have worried that Facebook would attempt to squeeze more value out of Instagram. Tat includes driving referral traffic to the main app via spammy notifications, in...

By Josh Constine on Sep 30 We cared about Cambridge Analytica because it could have helped elect Trump. We ignored LocationSmart because even the though the company was selling and exposing the real-time GPS coordinates of our phones, it was never clear exactly if or how that data was misused. This idea, that privacy issues are abstract concepts for most people until they become security or ideological problems, is important to understanding Facebook’s  massive breach revealed this week.  The social network’s engineering was sloppy, allowing three bugs to be combined to steal the access tokens of 50 million people. In pursuit of rapid growth at affordable efficiency, Facebook failed to protect its users. This assessment doesn’t discount that. Facebook screwed up big time. But despite the potential that those access tokens could have let the attackers take over user accounts, act as them, and scrape their personal info, it’s unclear how much users really care. That’s be...

By Taylor Hatmaker on Sep 28 Even if you never log into Facebook  itself these days, the other apps and services you use might be impacted by Facebook’s latest big, bad news. In a follow-up call on Friday’s revelation that Facebook  has suffered a security breach affecting at least 50 million accounts, the company clarified that Instagram users were not out of the woods — nor were any other third-party services that utilized Facebook Login. Facebook Login is the tool that allows users to sign in with a Facebook account instead of traditional login credentials and many users choose it as a convenient way to sign into a variety of apps and services. Third-party apps and sites affected too Due to the nature of the hack, Facebook cannot rule out the fact that attackers may have also accessed any Instagram  account linked to an affected Facebook account through Facebook Login. Still, it’s worth remembering that while Facebook can’t rule it out, the company has no eviden...