Scripty vs Scriptly

Following an investigation by Bloomberg, the company admitted that it had been employing third-party contractors to transcribe the audio messages that users exchanged on its Messenger app.

“It’s like they’re stalking you,” says Court. “They put all sorts of circumstantial evidence together, and you’re marketed to as if they’re listening to your conversations.”

Facebook-parent Meta has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a decade-old class action lawsuit over a practice that allowed the social network to track users' activity across the internet, even if they had logged out of the platform.

A 17-year-old girl and her mother have been charged with a series of felonies and misdemeanors after an apparent medication abortion at home in Nebraska. The state’s case relies on evidence from the teenager’s private Facebook messages, obtained directly from Facebook by court order, which show the mother and daughter allegedly bought medication online to induce abortion, and then disposed of the body of the fetus.

In February [2018], Facebook was ordered to stop collecting private information about Belgian users on third-party sites through the use of cookies. Facebook was also ordered to delete all data it collected illegally from Belgians, including those who aren't Facebook users but may have still landed on a Facebook page, or risk being fined up to 100 million euros.

The $5 billion penalty against Facebook is the largest ever imposed on any company for violating consumers’ privacy and almost 20 times greater than the largest privacy or data security penalty ever imposed worldwide. It is one of the largest penalties ever assessed by the U.S. government for any violation.

The personal information of about half a billion Facebook users, including their phone numbers, have been posted to a website used by hackers, cybersecurity experts say.

Starting 2019, Facebook was caught in January exploiting a loophole in Apple's iOS policies and distributing a research app using an enterprise certificate. With this type of certificate, the app was able to gain root access to a user's device and gather information, such as constant location tracking and messages and media from third-party apps.

Hundreds of millions of Facebook passwords were exposed within the company, sparking a debate among infosec experts over whether it was a simple mistake or an example of bad-faith actions by the company.
Facebook Thursday admitted that hundreds of millions of user passwords were stored in plaintext within the company's network.

A year after the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal, researchers have discovered publicly exposed data stores belonging to two more third-party developed Facebook apps.
The cyber risk team at security firm UpGuard found one data store originating from the Mexico-based media company Cultura Colectiva of 146GB, containing more than 540 million records, detailing comments, likes, reactions, account names, Facebook IDs and more.

@Meta /Facebook auto-tagged this woman as me on someone else’s photo dump.
Turns out she’s my great-great-great grandmother, Maria Schäfer, who immigrated to the US from Russia in 1899.

Pesenti says more than one-third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted into Face Recognition scanning, and over a billion face recognition profiles will be deleted as part of the upcoming change.

Facebook decided not to notify over 530 million of its users whose personal data was lifted in a breach sometime before August 2019 and was recently made available in a public database. Facebook also has no plans to do so, a spokesperson said.
Phone numbers, full names, locations, some email addresses, and other details from user profiles were posted to an amateur hacking forum on Saturday, Business Insider reported last week.

Patents filed by Facebook that mention People You May Know show some ingenious methods that Facebook has devised for figuring out that seeming strangers on the network might know each other. One filed in 2015 describes a technique that would connect two people through the camera metadata associated with the photos they uploaded. It might assume two people knew each other if the images they uploaded looked like they were titled in the same series of photos—IMG_4605739.jpg and IMG_4605742, for example—or if lens scratches or dust were detectable in the same spots on the photos, revealing the photos were taken by the same camera.

Chicago attorney Jay Edelson sued Facebook in Cook County Circuit Court back in 2015, alleging that the platform’s use of facial recognition tagging was not allowed under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The lawsuit claimed that Facebook’s Tag Suggestions tool, which scanned faces in users’ photos and offered suggestions about who the person might be, stored biometric data without users’ consent in violation of the Illinois law.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Monday sued Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., alleging that the social media giant for years collected Texans’ biometric data without their full consent, in violation of state privacy laws.
Paxton’s lawsuit, filed in district court in Harrison County, alleges that Facebook collected users’ biometric identifiers from photos and videos without properly informing them, shared the data with third parties and failed to delete it in a timely way, from about 2010 to late 2021 — when Meta announced it would shut down Facebook’s facial recognition system and delete the data it collected on more than 1 billion people.

An experimental algorithm out of Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab can recognise people in photographs even when it can’t see their faces. Instead it looks for other unique characteristics like your hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose.

Rebecca Porter, we discovered, is my great aunt, by marriage. She is married to my biological grandfather’s brother; she met him 35 years ago, the year after I was born. Facebook knew my family tree better than I did.

If walking away from $850 million feels like penance, Acton has gone further. He has supercharged a small messaging app, Signal, run by a security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike with a mission to put users before profit, giving it $50 million and turning it into a foundation. Now he’s working with the same people who built the opensource encryption protocol that is part of Signal and protects WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users and that also sits as an option on Facebook Messenger, Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Allo messenger. Essentially, he’s re-creating WhatsApp in the pure, idealized form it started: free messages and calls, with end-to-end encryption and no obligations to ad platforms.