Social Media and its influence

Die umstrittene Gesichtserkennung wird bei Facebook stetig weiterentwickelt. Forscher des Konzerns wollen nun mit der Technik "Deepface" eine Erkennungsrate erreichen, die nahe der des Menschen liegt.

The microblogging site adds a new security measure designed to make it harder for organizations like the National Security Agency to uncover its data. Read this article by Donna Tam on CNET News.

Facebook aurait reçu des autorités européennes 8 500 demandes d'informations utilisateurs au premier semestre 2013, dont 1 500 effectuées par la France.

This time, the problem was one of confidentiality, not availability.

Simply put, he found that, if you had Facebook's Photo Sync feature turned on, then any app with permission to access photos on your phone could access your synced photos, too.

Photo Sync means that whenever you take photos with your phone (and that includes screenshots, by the way), Facebook's app automatically uploads them to Facebook's cloud in case you want to publish them online later.

We can't think why that's a good idea, but many people seem to find the feature useful because:

You get an automatic backup of every photo.
Uploaded photos are private by default, so they aren't visible to other people until you want them to be.
It makes it convenient to share photos later on.
Laxman's bug was the fact that apps other than Facebook's own could read those synced photos back from the cloud.

Obviously, if you've authorised an app to access the photos on your device, you have already accepted the risk of allowing that app to do unsavoury things with private snapshots you might take.

So this is not an earth-moving bug, but it's definitely a security hole.

Learn more:

- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/digital-citizenship-social-media-and-privacy/

Twitter is shelving a project that would encrypt direct messages sent through its network, a report claims.

The social media giant is allegedly giving up encrypting private direct messages, which would make it more difficult for hackers and government officials to intercept Twitter messages without the rights to do so.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-direct-message-encryption-2014-3#ixzz2whO4GOHp

Since November last year, 93,788 Twitter users - who thought their micro-blogging updates were private and protected - were being silently snooped upon.

Twitter has now fixed the embarrassing privacy flaw, and apologised to the victims.

Zwei US-Amerikaner klagen derzeit gegen Facebook und werfen dem sozialen Netzwerk vor, Privatnachrichten für Werbezwecke mitgelesen zu haben.

Technology that derives personality traits from Twitter updates is being tested to help target promotions and personalize customer service.

Don't want the entire Facebook-using and -abusing population to see your friends list? You could set your friend list to private, but fat lot of good that will do, given a researcher's discovery th...

Irene Abezgauz, a vice president of product management at the security software company Quotium, has discovered a way for any casual visitor, stranger, stalker or troll to see friend lists that their users have set to be private, and that includes any friends who've also set their lists to be private.

Using the power of Social Media, I FREAKED PEOPLE OUT by making them think I knew personal information about them! Join the Vale Nation► http://bit.ly/JoinVa...

Bislang konnten Facebook-Mitglieder festlegen, dass ihr Profil nicht angezeigt wird, wenn jemand ihren Namen in die Suchbox eingibt. Künftig geht das nicht mehr.

L'option qui permettait d'empêcher quiconque de trouver son profil Facebook via une recherche par nom ne sera bientôt plus disponible.