Daily Archives: February 27, 2020

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is in the midst of a massive pivot toward privacy following years of controversy and data scandals. It's been less than a year since CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his "privacy-focused vision" in a lengthy manifestothat pins Facebook's future on encryption, ephemeral posts, and interoperability across the company's messaging platforms.

Over the years, Zuck has regularly dismissed the notion of introducing a subscription model that eschews ads altogether in favor of a monthly fee. "All of the research that we have -- it may still end up being the right thing to offer that as a choice down the line -- but all the data that I've seen suggests that the vast, vast, vast majority of people want a free service," Zuckerberg said a year ago.

Mark Zuckerberg. Image source: Facebook.

Speaking of research, a recent study has just attempted to pin monetary values on certain aspects of online privacy.

This month, the Tech Policy Institute (TPI) released the results of a studyacross six different countries -- the U.S., Argentina, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. The study looked at different forms of data sharing and asked respondents how much Facebook would have to pay them to consent to disclosing information to third parties. The results are less about how much users might be willing to pay Facebook to remove ads, but rather seek to estimate a monetary value associated with privacy.

As might be expected, respondents placed the highest average value on financial data such as a bank account balance ($8.44 per month), biometric information like fingerprint data ($7.56 per month), and private texts ($6.05 per month). Sharing location information was worth just $1.82 per month.

German consumers tended to assign higher values for privacy compared to users in the U.S. or Latin America, according to the study. That's partially related to a strong preference for financial privacy. There was a particularly stark contrast in how much consumers valued their personal contact information.

Country

Amount Facebook Would Need to Pay for Permission to Share Contact Information

Germany

$8 per month

U.S.

$3.50 per month

Mexico

$2.30 per month

Colombia

$0.52 per month

Data source: TPI.

On average, women also appeared to value privacy more than men, as did older users. There was no apparent correlation between income and privacy valuation.

"Differences in how much people value privacy of different data types across countries suggests that people in some places may prefer weaker rules while people in other places might prefer stronger rules," TPI's Scott Wallsten, one of the study's authors, toldReuters.

It's also worth noting the stark differences in Facebook's monetizationacross geographies. Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) in North America is over 15 times higher than its "Rest of world" segment.

Region

ARPU (Q4'19)

U.S. and Canada

$41.41

Europe

$13.21

Asia-Pacific

$3.57

Rest of world

$2.48

Data source: Facebook.

If Facebook were to charge a subscription fee to remove ads, these figures represent how much Facebook would require throughout a quarter in order to offset ad revenue. For example, Facebook would need to charge a monthly subscription fee of around $13.80 in the U.S. and Canada to break even from removing ads, on average.

The tech giant could ostensibly pay U.S. users $3.50 per month for permission to share their contact data with third-party advertisers and then sell that information wholesale. Facebook currently does notsell personal information to advertisers directly, but instead targets users on advertisers' behalf. Data leaks and breaches are a different story.

Go here to read the rest:

Here's How Much Your Privacy on Facebook Is Worth - The Motley Fool

It wasn't so long ago thatFacebook's (NASDAQ:FB) stock seemed to be a sure thing.Even recently, the stock seemed to be on the way to a nice recovery following the company's missteps on data privacy and other issues. However, investors seemed frustrated with Facebook's latest quarterly results and the shares dropped almost 10% over the next two days. Challenges from expense growth to changes that could hamper Facebook's advertising business have cast a shadow over the stock.

By contrast, Twitter has received its share of criticism over the years. Yet after its earnings report, the shares jumped 15%. At first, it seems like the choice between the two companies has never been clearer. In reality, Facebook's recent setback represents a buying opportunity for long-term investors.

Image credit: Getty Images

Facebook generated more than 98% of its quarterly revenue from advertising, so any slowdown is a serious concern. InFacebook's conference call, CFO Dave Wehner delivered several updates that likely contributed to the stock's recent decline.

He said that regulatory impacts would curb Facebook's ability to "utilize signals from user activity on third-party websites and services in order to deliver relevant and effective ads to our users." In case that's not clear, this is corporate-speak for we won't be able to track users' activity, and thus our advertising revenue could run into challenges. If you've ever experienced the surreal situation of looking at an item on Amazon.comor eBayand then magically seeing an ad for it in your Facebook timeline, you've experienced Facebook's use of these "signals."

In addition, the company will be releasing a privacy tool to billions of users. It's reasonable to assume that a portion will adjust their settings to prevent Facebook from tracking their usage of third-party sites. Furthermore, Wehner said, "Apple and Google have announced product changes and future plans that will limit our ability to use those signals."

The bottom line is clear: The less effectively Facebook can track users' activity, "that can negatively impact our advertising revenue growth," in Wehner's words.

What some investors may be forgetting is that even if Facebook's advertising business slows down, it will still likely outperform Twitter's performance in the same area. Last quarter, Facebook generated $20.7 billion in advertising revenue, which increased by 25% year over year. Twitter's advertising revenue reached $885 millionand increased by 12%.

Beyond the revenue numbers, Facebook's ad business seems to suggest pricing power. According to Wehner, "total number of ad impressions served across our services increased 31%, and the average price per ad decreased 5%." By point of comparison, Twitter reported that total ad engagements increased 29%, while the cost per engagement decreased by 13%. Said another way, Facebook generated faster transaction growth than Twitter without having to cut prices as far. Even if Facebook's growth slows, it should still handily outperform its peer.

The growth narrative for Facebook has been that the company's user growth will slow, yet it will capitalize on better engagement and grow advertising revenue. However, comments from management suggest Facebook is finally getting serious about its massive payments opportunity. With billions of people using Facebook's different properties, connecting buyers and sellers as a payments intermediary could open up a whole new revenue stream for the social media giant.

The company recently started quoting a stat called family daily active people (DAP) that gives investors a sense of the payments opportunity. Last quarter, Facebook's DAP across its properties reached 2.2 billion.With billions of potential payment users, Facebook isn't starting from scratch moving in on new territory. The Instagram property allows users to buy directly from the app. The company hopes that Facebook Pay will become a standard payment method across multiple properties. Inside of the popular messaging app WhatsApp, the company tested payments. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "when so many people kept using it week after week, we knew it was going to be big when we get to launch."

The worry for Facebook investors is that this big business may not succeed. Several years ago, Twitter's data licensing division seemed to be the future of that company. With hundreds of millions of users tweeting massive amounts of data, it seemed to make sense that this would be a goldmine. Unfortunately, this business has run into challenges. In last year's fourth quarter, the data business grew by 35% annually. Just a year later, this same segment grew by just 5% year over year.

The key difference between Twitter's data business and Facebook's payments ambitions is scale and user composition. Twitter's vast pool of data is heavily tilted toward those who are the most active on the service, many of whom are celebrities. Twitter seems to lack the personal conversations that Facebook properties have in abundance. When a celebrity tweets, the response might be a thousand or two thousand replies, yet there is little real conversation.

Where Facebook is concerned, real interactions between friends and family members give the company significant data about where people are and what they are spending money on. Though Facebook's brand has been tarnished because of past security issues, its other properties don't have the same stigma. WhatsApp has an estimated 2 billion users. If only 10% of users started making payments, this property alone would quickly become a significant threat to payments players like PayPal, Square's Cash App, and more.

Over the last several years, it has been difficult to think of Facebook's stock as cheap. For the first time in a while, the combination of tempered expectations and a realistic growth narrative give investors a chance to buy the stock at a solid value.

If we look at Facebook and Twitter side by side, the better investment nearly jumps off the page.

Measurement

Facebook

Twitter

2020 Projected P/E ratio

18

34

2020 Projected revenue growth

21.2%

15.4%

5-year annual EPS growth

13.2%

13.9%

3 month core operating cash flow growth

8.6%

(35.7%)

Net cash balance and annual growth

$54.9 billion +33.6%

$3.5 billion (22.2%)

(Source: Yahoo Finance for forward P/E ratios; analyst estimates for P/E, revenue growth and five-year EPS projections; three-month operating cash flow growth and net cash results author's calculation from most recent earnings release.)

In short, Facebook offers a forward P/E ratio that is nearly half that of its peer yet is projected to grow earnings at nearly the same rate. While Facebook grew its operating cash flow and net cash, Twitter witnessed a decline by both measures.

If we follow famed investor Warren Buffett's advice to "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful," the short-term worries about Facebook suggest a long-term opportunity. Facebook's growth may be slowing down, yet the stock has never looked like a better value.

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Facebook's Growth Is Slowing Down, Yet the Stock Has Never Looked Like a Better Value - Motley Fool

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. You'd be hard-pressed to name an American company that's more distrusted and yet more influential today than Facebook. The social media site has been rocked by scandals involving the misuse of its users' personal information and harsh criticism of its role in the 2016 election. And yet it remains huge, with nearly 3 billion users, and profitable, with annual earnings in the billions of dollars. Our guest, Steven Levy, is a veteran technology journalist who's been reporting on Facebook for years and has written a new in-depth history of the company. Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Levy leaving nine interviews and permission to talk to many other present and former employees of the company. Levy writes that virtually every problem Facebook has confronted since 2016 is a consequence of its unprecedented mission to connect the world and its reckless haste to do so.

Steven Levy has written for Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times and The New Yorker. He's now editor at large for Wired and the author of seven previous books. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies about his new book, "Facebook: The Inside Story."

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Steven Levy welcome to FRESH AIR. You have covered technology for a long time. When did you decide you had to make this a book-length exploration of Facebook?

STEVEN LEVY: I could pinpoint that pretty precisely. I think it was the end of August of 2015. Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook feed that a billion people had signed on to Facebook that day, and I realized that had never happened before. I'd covered Facebook for a long time before that, but I realized that this is something utterly new, enabled by technology and whatever this company did. And I had to write about it and explain how that happened and what it meant and how they dealt with it.

DAVIES: Right. So what kind of commitment did Zuckerberg and others at Facebook make to cooperating with you?

LEVY: Well, it took me a few months to get them to this point, but eventually, they agreed to give me access to their employees, including Mark and Sheryl Sandberg, his chief operating officer. And this is also very important. They would give a go-ahead to former employees who wouldn't talk to me unless Facebook said it was OK. There were no strings attached. They didn't get the read the manuscript. The only thing that I said was the interviews I did for the book would be embargoed for the book. And I wouldn't be able to take something if someone said something controversial and just write it in an article for Wired the next day.

DAVIES: All right. Everything on the record?

LEVY: Well, they're allowed to go and background. They're off the record if they wanted to go there. And some of the interviews I did, particularly with some people who may be - not be at Facebook, were either on background or not for attribution. So some people were a little worried about direct quotes against Facebook being in the book.

DAVIES: Right. That makes sense. But Zuckerberg himself - was all that on the record?

LEVY: I don't think Mark once said, this is off the record. I think pretty much everything he says - there's - the PR people can't say, Mark, don't say that. At least they don't. And he calls his own shots. Some other people would say, oh, let me say this off the record. And I would try to dissuade them, but a couple of people did that. And one in particular - in the course of our interviews, I kept saying, hey; this has got to be on the record. I really ought to use this.

DAVIES: Right. What's he like in person? What was the relationship like?

LEVY: We got to a pretty good place where I think he was probably as candid with me as he's been with any journalist, although I don't think he ever forgot that he was talking to a journalist. He has grown over the years as an interviewee. When I first met him and started asking him questions - this is 2006 - he would just stare at me blankly. And it took him a while before I can get any answer out of him. And by the time I started this book, he had obviously been more comfortable with this. He'd been a CEO for many years and a CEO of a public company, so he understood how to give answers to journalists. And he's a very curious person. People describe him as a learning machine. So sometimes he'll ask questions of me, and I think he did this with other journalists, too.

DAVIES: Yeah. Can you think of an example of him asking you a question?

LEVY: Well, I think one of the most interesting examples - and this sort of casts a light on how Facebook is dealing with its current issues - it was 2018, and it was a run up to their big developer conference they called F8, which has the resonance of fate. And he was explaining to me how he was going to spend half of his keynote speech not apologizing exactly but saying that Facebook knew it made mistakes and we're going to win back your trust. And the other half was going to be about how - well, we have to introduce new things, too, because we can't stand still. So on one hand, it was saying, hey; don't worry; we're fine, and on the other hand saying, here's the new disturbing things we're doing.

And he said, well, we're going to introduce a product called Facebook Dating. And I said, really? Don't you think that's a little off-tone considering people are so concerned about the data they give you? This is just basically a few weeks after Cambridge Analytica, which was the biggest scandal in the company's history, involving the release of data. And he said, well, Facebook has always been sort of a secret dating site of some kind, and we don't think it's that big a deal. And then he went on. And then a few minutes later, he just stopped and he said, hey; do you really think that's going to be a big problem for us?

DAVIES: What'd you say?

LEVY: I said, yeah.

DAVIES: (Laughter) And it didn't happen or did happen? It says in the book, but I can't remember.

LEVY: Well, he - as one would expect, people said, what's going on here? In this moment, they're introducing a dating site. They introduce it in some smaller countries first. And then a year later, they rolled it out to the United States, and you can now date on Facebook.

DAVIES: One of the things you see about Facebook after it got going for a few years was there was a decision to focus on growth - more users, more engagement among the users that we have. What motivated this? I mean...

LEVY: Well...

DAVIES: It's sort of natural for every business, I suppose, but...

LEVY: Sure.

DAVIES: This was sort of a different business.

LEVY: Right, right. Well, it's - every business wants to grow. But what this thing with Facebook was its relentless focus on growth. And Mark always believed in it, but in 2008, an executive named Chamath Palihapitiya said, I want to take this a step farther. I want to start an internal group called the Growth Circle. And we would just do anything we can to make Facebook grow faster and faster and faster and get it to a billion people really, really quickly. And this was unthinkable at the time, but Chamath was very smart, and he gathered the team of the best people at Facebook. He got a few people from outside. And they were almost a group, a wrecking crew from within Facebook. They sat differently in a different place than everyone else, and they did things that really pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in Silicon Valley practices to push growth even farther than it had before.

DAVIES: What were some of the things that they did?

LEVY: Well, one thing was - and this was kind of standard; they did a really great job of it - was to make Facebook higher and higher when you searched in Google for it. And, you know, Facebook profiles were available on Google, so when people search themselves, a Facebook profile would come up with you with your name on it, even though you weren't there. And they would encourage you to take a look and sign up. And another thing was sometimes they would - if you signed up...

DAVIES: Wait one second. You said that it would show a profile of you even if you weren't a user, weren't registered with Facebook?

LEVY: That's right. This is a controversial area of Facebook. It's something - Mark, you know, in 2006, he kept this notebook, and he would speculate on something called dark profiles. And Facebook didn't quite implement it the way he outlined that, which is almost like a Wikipedia page that your friends would start about you even if you weren't on Facebook. That didn't happen.

But there was apparently something - I talked to a couple people in early Facebook who said that if someone tagged you in a photo, Facebook would keep a stub that you would then bring to life if you actually came and signed up for it. And Chamath told me that, yeah, one of the things they would do was have this - he referred to it as a dark profile to me - that would show up. And if you signed up, then they would immediately try to populate your newsfeed so you would have a reason to stay on Facebook.

DAVIES: Right. And so if I weren't even registered with Facebook but Facebook collected information about me - because there's information on the Internet - someone does a Google search and finds my name, then suddenly there's me connected with Facebook. I see that. And I think, how - man, I should sign up? (Laughter).

LEVY: That's what Chamath told me. Oh, yeah. And you know, So...

DAVIES: Wow.

LEVY: ...Facebook has since said that they never use shadow profiles or dark profiles for reasons like that. And I'm not quite sure what they do now, you know, but they do keep tabs on people for security reasons and some other things. But they say they don't serve advertising to anything they keep. So it's sort of a gray area that I found some contradictions when I was doing the book.

DAVIES: They also translated the site into foreign languages and - so that it would grow internationally, too. Right?

LEVY: That's right. And you know, they were very aggressive about translations. They didn't hire translators. They let people - users in that country translate it themselves. And they would sometimes refine it. And especially in the big countries, they would do refinements. But in obscure dialects of certain languages, people would just, you know, translate for themselves. And in some smaller countries, Facebook would be in there in the native language when no one at Facebook spoke the language. There was no way to police what went on in that country from Facebook.

DAVIES: Right. And in some cases, it became a major medium of information and was abused - right? - by people spreading rumors and hate speech.

LEVY: That's right. We're thinking - yeah. Yeah, the prime example is Myanmar, where Facebook went and became very popular. And then it became even more popular when Facebook wound up giving it away. If you had a mobile plan, you wouldn't pay for the Facebook pages you used. So it became almost, like, synonymous with the Internet in Myanmar and some other places. Meanwhile, Facebook had at first none and then very few people who could read what was going on there and couldn't police it. And it was abuse. People would put up false content that spurred people to violence, literally. And it wasn't until 2015 that Facebook even translated its book of rules into Burmese.

DAVIES: Steven Levy is editor at large for Wired. His new book is "Facebook: The Inside Story." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALEXANDRE DESPLAT'S "SPY MEETING")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Steven Levy. He is editor at large for Wired. He is a veteran technology writer, and he has a deep dive into Facebook. His new book is called "Facebook: The Inside Story."

All right. Let's talk about the 2016 presidential campaign. How much did Facebook know, as that campaign progressed, about Russian efforts to plant fake or provocative stories in the newsfeed and also put bogus information in ads it was buying?

LEVY: Well, the Russian misinformation, which we could talk about, is part of a number of things that happened in the 2016 election that Facebook was involved in. The first thing was, you know, proliferation of fake stories. This called fake news weren't necessarily cooked up by the Russians. Only a small percentage of those turned out to be a part of this big Russian disinformation campaign that took place on Facebook. But a lot of it was done for financial gain - a lot of it from this small town in Macedonia, as it turned out, where people would make up fake stories or take a fake story that some obscure blogger posted and circulate it on Facebook.

And because of decisions made earlier in Facebook's history - around 2008 and 2009, Mark had a Twitter obsession, and he made Facebook more friendly to things that went viral on the system. These fake news stories - things like, you know, the pope endorsed Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton was involved in a sex ring in a pizzeria - they would go viral on Facebook and be more popular than legitimate news stories.

And Facebook had been warned against this sort of phenomenon. And particularly in the later stage of the presidential campaign, people were saying - hey, this has got to stop. But the company made a decision not to stop it because they felt it was part of people's expression to be able to post what they wanted. And Facebook didn't want to be in the position of a referee. Now, that decision, in part, was made by the head of Facebook's Washington office, who was a lifelong Republican and who saw his job, according to people who worked with him, as protecting the Republicans.

So that went on till the end of the election, and fake news proliferated on Facebook.

DAVIES: And I think it's worth making the point that one of the reasons that people in Macedonia found that they could make money by doing this was that, as part of its drive for growth, Facebook had its algorithm tweaked so that the most addictive material would come up at the top of your newsfeed. So there was an incentive for viral stuff, whether it was true or not.

LEVY: Right. Engagement was part of the formula for what would appear on your newsfeed. So if a lot of people shared a post, it would be ranked higher and it would appear in more people's newsfeeds.

DAVIES: Right. So what about the ads that were coming through?

LEVY: So - the fact is that Facebook offered help to political candidates who wanted to use Facebook better. And one side did a much better job of it than the other, and that was Donald Trump's team. And they took advantage of everything you could on Facebook. They spent much, much more on Facebook than the Clinton campaign did. They accepted the help that Facebook offered both sides, and they just built the heck out of their campaign around Facebook. They would do things like create many, many variations of an ad directed to different kinds of people just to see what clicked, and the Clinton campaign did nothing like that.

So the people at Facebook watched this with kind of awe. They're saying, wow, these people are really doing a great job with our campaign there on the Trump campaign. They didn't do anything about it because it wasn't - you know, they wanted to be fair to both sides. And they weren't too bothered by it because they thought - well, Clinton's going to win anyway, so this is just an interesting phenomenon about how someone uses our platform.

DAVIES: And the company was making money from every ad, right?

LEVY: Oh, sure. Yeah, it was making money. It wasn't the giant part of their revenues, but political ads in general were a significant source of revenue.

DAVIES: Right. And of course, it's worth mentioning that that microtargeting of ads based on Facebook's information about its users was its chief selling point, not just on political ads but everything. I mean, you could really a target an ad at a specific kind of customer.

LEVY: Right. And it sort of changed what the feel-good pitch of Facebook advertising was. You know, they would always say when you complained about microtargeting was - hey, this helps us serve more relevant ads to people. If you're interested in a certain musical star, we're going to let you know when that person has an album out or is appearing in your area because the advertisers will know where to find you.

This is something a little different because Facebook knows so much about you that you could target someone who might be vulnerable to a certain kind of pitch that make you change your mind about something or even deter you from voting. So this isn't part of the feel-good vibe of Facebook advertising that it presents to the world.

DAVIES: So Trump wins the election, which was not well-greeted by a lot of the staff at Facebook.

LEVY: No, people were in tears when it's what happened, and they had a big meeting the day after the election.

DAVIES: Tell us about the meeting.

LEVY: Well, people wanted to know for the first time - gee, did we have a hand in this? Were we, in part, responsible for this electoral outcome that we, meaning a lot of the people at Facebook, didn't want to see? And there was some soul-searching among them. And a couple days afterwards, though, Mark Zuckerberg, in speaking at a conference in Half Moon Bay, said he thought it was a crazy idea to think that Facebook influenced the election, which was a statement he had to later walk back.

DAVIES: Right. And eventually, real information came out. How did Zuckerberg's attitude change then?

LEVY: Well, I think he realized that, one, it sounded blithe. I actually was in the room when he said that, and it really didn't sound that blithe. It was part of a longer, more thoughtful answer, and it didn't really bring the room to a standstill. But we learned more in the weeks following about the abuse of Facebook, including the Russian disinformation campaign that took place on Facebook through ads and other posts. And it didn't seem like such a reach when we learned those things.

DAVIES: Yeah. How big were the numbers? How many people were - how many users got this misinformation?

LEVY: Well, the Russian disinformation was hundreds of thousands - but again, not a big percentage at all, a very tiny percentage of the stuff that people saw on Facebook. Yet it had some really disturbing aspects to it.

The Russians would do things - like, they would be able to find people who were against immigration and tell them - hey, there's this rally happening somewhere in Texas, you know, that's pro-immigration. You ought to go there and protest against it. And then they would inform people who were on the other side about the same rally, which was a nonexistent rally that the Russians were trying to create to bring two sides together that might fight each other. Basically, they were just trying to sow dissent and bad feelings to make people think that the system was really screwed up and, in some cases, deter them from voting.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Steven Levy, editor at large for Wired and author of the new book "Facebook: The Inside Story."

After a break, they'll talk about the damage to Facebook from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and about Mark Zuckerberg's plans for the future of the company. Later, Ken Tucker will review a newly released Bryan Ferry concert recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1974. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF WAYNE HORVITZ AND THE ROYAL ROOM COLLECTIVE ENSEMBLE'S "A WALK IN THE RAIN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview Dave Davies recorded with Wired editor at large Steven Levy about the social media giant Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Levy nine interviews and permission to talk to many other present and former employees of the company for Levy's new book, "Facebook: The Inside Story." When we left off, they were talking about the damage to Facebook's reputation from its role in the 2016 presidential election.

DAVIES: The criticisms about the fake news and the ad campaigns, some of them from foreign sources, were almost overshadowed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This really grew out of a decision Facebook had made to make its product not just a social networking site but a platform so that outside software developers could use Facebook data to create apps, software products on Facebook. This was kind of a fateful decision, wasn't it?

LEVY: That's right, and this took place really early in Facebook's history, in 2007. It was a big leap that Facebook all of a sudden said, we want to be kind of the next operating system in the world, and this will be a social operating system. The Internet should be built around people, and we're the place that's going to host that. And you can't say the platform was an unmitigated failure because they really lifted Facebook to the top rung of technology companies. It took place in 2007. And all of a sudden, everyone was talking about Facebook in a way they weren't before. And a couple of months afterwards, I wrote a cover story about Facebook for Newsweek, where I was working then.

But the problem with it was, first, in order to do this, you had to hand over personal data to outsiders, to the software developers who were writing applications for this Facebook platform. And the platform itself had its dreams dashed when mobile phones became popular and people used those as operating systems. So your iPhone apps or your Android apps would be the operating system that you used, and the developers turned their attention to writing applications for phones. The platform still persisted, but it became more of an exchange of information between the developers and Facebook, with Facebook giving a lot of the information to the developers.

In 2010 - and this was where I really say Cambridge Analytica started - Facebook said, we'll give more information than ever to the developers. So when you signed up as a user for one of these apps, the third party would not only get your information that you posted on Facebook but the information that your friends posted on Facebook. You would be giving away your friends' likes, which are very revealing, and their relationship status, sometimes their political status - all falling out of the hands of Facebook into the hands of these developers who could use them for their apps and were told, you can't sell these or give them to anyone else. But Facebook didn't really have strong enforcement to make sure that happened.

DAVIES: And so Cambridge Analytica ends up getting the data of tens of millions of Facebook users.

LEVY: That's right. There was an academic researcher who followed Facebook's rules in getting the information but then broke Facebook's rules in licensing the information to this company called Cambridge Analytica, which was run by this British military consultancy company, which made a partnership with a big funder of the far-right in the United States.

DAVIES: Right, the Mercers.

LEVY: Right.

DAVIES: Right. You said that it's - to this day, it isn't clear whether the company's election efforts used Facebook profiles. Is that right? I thought that was accepted fact.

LEVY: Well, they had the data handed over, but the Trump campaign, which worked with Cambridge Analytica, said that they really didn't use it much as a data source. But they helped with television ads, and they liked some of the people who worked there. It is fuzzy because on the other hand, the head of Cambridge Analytica, the company behind it, was boasting about the information they used. So I think it is a big mystery the degree to which that data was used in the election, but we do know the Trump campaign did use a lot of data and merged it with other databases.

I think the shock to people was that this information got handed over to this company that no one ever heard of that worked for Trump. And that became Facebook's biggest scandal, ironically, even though some of this information had been published in 2015 by The Guardian, the same place that returned with the scoop in 2018. But this is pre-Trump, and it wasn't a big deal then.

DAVIES: So this information about the 2016 campaign and then a subsequent hack of, like, 50 million user accounts sent the company's public image into a real nosedive. And Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress, and they promised serious steps to change things. What are they doing?

LEVY: Well, they've done a number of things. For one thing, they give you more information. When you see something that looks like it's fake on Facebook, they have fact-checkers go over some of these claims. And when they turn out they're not factual, they don't take them off, but they might downrank it in the newsfeed. Fewer people might say it. They give you a chance to mouse over and see a little more information about the publication where this is printed. Maybe it's, like, a phony publication that doesn't exist besides Facebook.

DAVIES: Now, those aren't ads. Those are items posted to the newsfeed, right? So...

LEVY: Right. Yeah. And also, they - during elections, they monitor things. They look for the signals of disinformation campaigns and try to shut them down. So they're doing certain things that would have stopped some of the tricks in the 2016 election. And in the couple elections since - the midterm in 2018, elections in France and other places - they've done a better job, but it's an open question of how well they're going to do in 2020 when the people using Facebook and trying to abuse it again are going to come up with a new set of tricks.

DAVIES: Steven Levy's book is "Facebook: The Inside Story." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF COOTIE WILLIAMS' "RINKY DINK")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Steven Levy. He is a veteran technology writer and the editor at large for Wired. He has a new book about the history of Facebook. It's called "Facebook: The Inside Story."

So Facebook has this challenge where people can post things on a newsfeed that may be misleading or false, right? And then...

LEVY: Correct.

DAVIES: People can run paid ads. What's the company's policy in dealing with potentially inaccurate or misleading information in the organic posts that people put on the site and the ads that people buy?

LEVY: Well, Facebook will allow people to post misleading content, but if it starts circulating a lot and people complain about it, it will have fact-checkers to verify whether that's true or not. And if it's not true, they may downrank it, show it to fewer people. Then they might provide extra information, saying, you know, this is a publication that you may not want to trust, or, here's some other articles about the same thing that are more factual. Ads are a different thing. Mark has gone out on a limb and said, we are not going to fact-check political ads. So if someone makes a false claim, even consciously, about an opponent in a political ad, Facebook is going to be hands-off.

DAVIES: Right, and that's been controversial.

LEVY: It's really controversial, but Mark has stuck to his guns on this. He went before Congress this past October, where people just pummeled him about this. But he feels that he doesn't want Facebook to be in the position of saying, you know, well, this politician's ad is fake. The thing is a lie, and this isn't.

DAVIES: Does the company have any disclosure requirements for funding sources of the ads?

LEVY: It's the same funding disclosures that people have for ads in print or on TV. You have to say, this is my ad, and I approve this content.

DAVIES: And for Facebook to be looking at not the ads but the posts by users, which might be factually suspect - I mean, given, you know, the scale of the posts every day, that's a huge challenge. How many people are doing this?

LEVY: Well, it is a huge challenge. So the problem they had in 2016 is these Russians were posting it on their fake accounts, so that's not allowed. So if the account is inauthentic, as Facebook calls it, it could be taken down. But if an authentic person somewhere posts something that's fake, Facebook will not take it down. And we've heard that one thing the outside actors - Russians - might do is get people in the United States to post the fake content that they create. And Facebook then, by its own rules, would not be taking it down.

DAVIES: Right. So a fake account can be taken down, right?

LEVY: Yeah. Yeah. So this - and this became clear early in the 2016 election, when there was a page called DCLeaks, which was meant to spread the emails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee. And at first, Facebook said, we're going to leave this up because it looks like a legitimate account. And then they figured out that it was not an authentic account, and they took it down because of that.

Read this article:

'Inside Story' Sheds Light On Facebook's Effort To Connect The World - NPR

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson says: "My office takes repeat violations of campaign finance laws seriously." Karen Ducey / Getty Images

Then, six months later, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson agreed to let Facebook settle the matter without an admission of guiltbut required the tech giant to pay a $200,000 penalty and warned that Facebook must follow Washington state's nation-leading election transparency laws going forward, or else "they're going to hear from us again."

Now Ferguson is telling state election regulators in Olympia that he "stands ready" to take Facebook to court over allegations that the company, within less than two months of his 2018 warning, went right back to breaking the same state law again, in the same way, repeatedly.

In a February 20 letter to leaders of the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, which last year charged Facebook with the new violations of state law, Ferguson told commission Chair David Ammons:

"My office takes repeat violations of campaign finance laws seriously. With regard to Facebook or any respondent that the Commission determines to be repeat violators of state campaign finance laws warranting prompt state action in court, my office stands ready to accept and act on the Commission's referrals."

By sending the letter, Ferguson was drawing attention to the power the PDC has to "refer enforcement matters to the Attorney General's Office for additional investigation and court action" whenever the PDC "believes that additional authority is needed to ensure full compliance with the state's campaign finance laws."

The agency has now spent more than a year investigating the current Facebook case, which, like Ferguson's 2018 lawsuit against Facebook, grows out of requests for local Facebook political ad data made by The Stranger and, separately, a private citizen.

The requests at the center of the current case were made in 2019 but, just like in the 2018 case, Facebook has refused to comply with state law requiring the company to disclose, to "any person" who asks, significant information on the financing and reach of election ads sold to influence this state's local races and ballot measures.

Even so, staff for the PDC recently presented a proposed settlement to commissioners that would allow Facebook to pay a $75,000 fine, again avoid any admission of guilt, and also avoid any promises of future compliance with state disclosure law.

After reviewing the proposed Facebook settlement, a half-dozen experts in campaign finance and digital ad transparency told The Stranger the deal is "dangerous," "troubling," and an insufficient "slap on the wrist" that "certainly isnt going to serve as a deterrent in the future."

Ten days after that story was published, Ferguson sent his letter to PDC Chair Ammons, copying the agency's four other commissioners and a half-dozen lawyers in the attorney general's complex litigation and government compliance and enforcement divisions.

The AG's office did not respond to follow-up questions about Ferguson's letter to the PDC, but Kim Bradford, a spokesperson for the PDC, confirmed Ammons had received the letter and said he'd sent no response ("nor did the attorney general ask for one").

Bradford also noted that Ferguson has the authority to "request" that matters be referred to him. His letter to Ammons, though it could certainly be read as an invitation to referral, stops short of making a formal request.

But Ammons and the rest of the commissioners are scheduled to discuss the proposed Facebook settlement tomorrow, February 27, at a 1 pm public hearing in Olympia.

If commissioners choose to set aside the "dangerous" settlement that Facebook "urges" them to accept, they could also choose to take Ferguson up on the implied offer in his February 20 letter: refer this case over to AG's office and Ferguson will show Facebook that, as he wrote in his letter, "my office takes repeat violations of campaign finance laws seriously."

Read the original here:

Attorney General Ferguson "Ready" to Take on Facebook Over Charges of Repeated Campaign Finance Violations - TheStranger.com

Haley Celeste Douthat, 25, of Rogersville, was sentenced on Thursday in Hawkins County Criminal Court to a total of 11 years including three years for the robbery to run concurrently with eight years for separate unrelated counts of delivery of meth and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The plea agreement accepted by Judge John Dugger states that Douthat must serve 365 days in jail, after which she can serve the remainder of her 11-year sentence on house arrest. She was also ordered to pay $2,300 in fines and $447 in restitution.

On Oct. 31, 2018, Douthat used communications on Facebook to lure a 42-year-old man to a residence at Cherokee Apartments on Route 66-S south of Rogersville.

After the victim arrived, three male suspects allegedly burst into the apartment wearing ski masks, beat the victim and stole $40 in cash and his phone.

The suspects then allegedly fled in the victims vehicle, which was later found wrecked.

What the four suspects didnt know at the time was the parking lot of the apartment complex was under video surveillance, and Hawkins County Sheriffs Office deputies led by Detective Keith Long were able to identify the suspects from that footage.

All four were named in Dec. 1, 2018, Hawkins County grand jury sealed indictments charging them with robbery, which was enhanced from a Class C felony (3-6 years) to a Class B felony (8-12 years) due to multiple suspects being involved.

As part of her plea agreement, Douthat's robbery charged was reduced to the Class C level.

As for her alleged accomplices, Danny Ray Bledsoe, 35, of Rogersville, is scheduled for trial June 10; Travis Shane Shattuck, 32, of Rogersville, was sentenced last year to three years of house arrest; and Todd Andrew Caswellwas sentenced last year to three years house arrest, although he violated his probation twice since then and has been in and out and back in to jail since his plea.

Other guilty pleas heard Thursday by Judge Dugger include:

Christopher George Cross, 30, Rogersville, was sentenced to one year at 30% and fined $350 for one count of attempted possession of contraband in a penal institution.

Bobby Ray Caudill, 58, Rogersville, was sentenced to three years on house arrest and fined $4,100 for two counts of possession of Schedule II narcotics with intent to deliver and maintaining a dwelling where narcotics are kept or sold.

Travis Scott Gilliam, 33, Rogersville, was sentenced to one year at 30% and fined $450 for two counts of violation of the sex offender registry and violation of community supervision for life.

Gerald Lynn Russell, 38, Rogersville, was sentenced to 120 days in jail, three years of supervised probation and fined $350 for unlawful possession of a weapon by a convicted felon.

Roscoe Paul Johnson, 38, Rogersville, was sentenced to 120 days in jail, two years of supervised probation and fined $1,200 for two counts of violation of the sex offender registry.

Link:

Woman who used Facebook romance to ambush robbery victim gets 11 years - Kingsport Times News

IF you've ever worried that you didn't logout of Facebook on someone else's device then you need the following advice.

Facebook has tech that tracks where your account is logged in and can help you logout or protect your account from people trying to hack into it.

4

Facebook can provide you with data on the location of the devices where your account is being used.

It can also tell you what kind of device it is, the type of browser and the date and time of when the account was last accessed.

If something doesn't look quite right then you can end any of the active Facebook sessions from the one you're logged into.

All you need is the steps below to access the information via your desktop or smartphone.

4

First you'll need to open your web browser of choice and log into your Facebook.

Next, click on the drop down arrow on the top banner of your homepage and select "Settings".

Once on the Settings page you'll need to click "Security and login", which should pop up as an option on the left-hand side of the screen.

Then roll your mouse over to the "Where you're logged in" section.

4

This section will allow you to see all the devices that your Facebook has been logged in on, including any that are currently active.

You'll also be able to see the time and date that the login occurred, what type of device was being used and its location.

If you click on the three vertical dots to the right hand side of each listed session you'll be able to log out or report it as not being you.

You'll also be given the option to "Log out of all sessions".

The process is very similar if you want to check where your Facebook is logged in via the app on your phone or tablet.

On the app you'll need to click on the three horizontal lines in the lower right-hand corner.

Then scroll down until you see "Settings" and click on it.

Once you're in "Settings" scroll down to "Security" and click on "Security and login".

4

You'll then see the section "Where you're logged in" and you can click "See all" to see all the devices.

As with the desktop method, you'll be able to see the time and date that the login occurred, what type of device was being used and its location.

If you click on the three vertical dots to the right hand side of each listed session you'll be able to log out or report it as not being you.

You'll also be given the option to "Log out of all sessions".

How does Facebook's user rating system work?

Facebook told The Sun that this is how the system works...

SAFETY FIRSTThe 6 TikTok settings you need to change right NOW to protect your kids

TIKTOK SHOCKWe showed 6 mums what kids REALLY watch on TikTok from porn to puppy slapping

AMAZON SLIMEBALLHusband's cheating romps 'caught through secret Alexa sex recordings'

A-ROCK-ALYPTICMind-blowing video shows terrifying size of asteroids that could hit Earth

Investigation

FILTH & FURYInside 'bullies' bootcamp' TikTok where kids swear and sing about 'p***y'

In other news, Facebook will now pay users for voice recordings in a bid to improve the firm's AI tech.

Chronology may be coming back to your Instagram feed as an app expert has spotteda "Latest Posts" featurebeing tested.

And, here's the six TikTok settings you need to change right now to protect your kids.

Have you ever had any issues with your Facebook privacy? Let us know in the comments...

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

View original post here:

How to find out if someone is logged into your Facebook and SPYING on you - The Sun

A "Zuck Buck" is displayed on a monitor as David Marcus, the executive leading Facebook's blockchain initiative, is questioned by U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 2019.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Facebook's Libra Association added a new member after shedding several partners in its ambition to create a new cryptocurrency.

E-commerce company Shopify announced Friday it will join the independent collective created by Facebook. Shopify said in a press release that its decision is part of its effort "to make commerce better in parts of the world where money and banking could be far better."

Libra Association leaders have touted the project as a way to make a reliable form of currency available and transferable around the world, particularly in underdeveloped and underbanked communities a claim lawmakers poked holes in during an October hearing with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Shopify's new membership follows a slew of defections from the Libra Association in the months since its unveiling in 2019. Payments companies were among the first to drop their membership after U.S. lawmakers called on executives from Visa, MasterCard and Stripe to assess the risks that could come with the project, citing Facebook's spotty history in protecting consumer's data. All three companies stepped back from the Libra Association and would be joined by PayPal, eBay, Booking Holdings, Mercado Pago and Vodafone.

The project still faces skepticism from regulators around the world. Over a series of congressional hearings last year, lawmakers grilled Facebook executives on their willingness to comply with relevant U.S. agencies and asked for assurances that the libra cryptocurrency would not weaken the U.S. dollar.

Zuckerberg told the House Financial Services Committee in October that Facebook would leave the Libra Association if it decided to launch the payments system before obtaining U.S. regulatory approval. But he stopped short of agreeing to a moratorium on the project while Congress determines the appropriate steps forward.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

WATCH: How Facebook's libra lost major partners and provoked the US government

Continued here:

Facebook's Libra Association adds Shopify as a member after a slew of defections - CNBC

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by vejaa/iStock/Getty Images Plus and fizkes/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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Care and Feeding is Slates parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I recently had our son, who is in first grade, tested for the gifted program at his school. I will admit that it was mostly motivated partially by my vanity and peer-pressure from friends who urged us to give it a go. (I also find gifted to be a problematic term and a relic of a narrow perspective on learning and talent that should be retired.) And, to be frank, I honestly dont think he is gifted. Funny, smart, cutely irreverent? Yes! But not talented academically per se.

Well, he did not get in. Its fine. We barely mentioned it to him, and he just thought he was pulled out for testing that other kids got as well. If my son asks why he doesnt get to go on the bus to the gifted school each Monday, what should I say? I should also say that his 10-year-old brother has been in the program since he was in first grade, and I worry about him feeling less than and left out.

Not Gifted, but OK, OK?

Dear NGbOO,

I agree with you: The term gifted sucks, and it creates any number of unnecessary emotions for both the children who dont gain acceptance into such a program, as well as those who do.

Tell your son that kids have different learning styles and that both he and his brother attend institutions that were determined to be the best fit for each of them by the folks who are in charge of the local schools. If he pushes further or seems to feel disappointed or insecure in any way about not being included, add that gifted is a poor word choice for the program that his sibling, and perhaps some of his former classmates, attend and that he is gifted in his own ways (with humor, kindness, creativity, etc.) Emphasize how he is special and capableif theres something he can do well or with ease that his brother couldnt at that age, highlight itand that he is in no way deficient or inadequate by comparison to any other child.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My cousin and I are both 33, and weve lived together for the past 10 years. Shes my best friend as well as family, and were both committed to continuing to share a home. She has wanted to be a parent for a long time, and now after much discussion and planning, its finally happening. Ive never wanted to be a parent myself, but I do fully support my cousin, and Im super excited about being a part of her childs life.

That said, I wish I had some sort of model for how this is going to go. Weve talked about it a lot, but I still feel like I dont know what kind of boundaries and expectations are reasonable. I want to help my cousin make our house a loving, caring home for the baby, but ultimately its not my child. I also know basically nothing about babies. Is there a parenting book out there for nonparents?

Cousin of the Baby-to-Be

Dear Cousin,

Congratulations to you! This is certainly an exciting development, albeit a somewhat complicated one.

As far as setting boundaries and expectations, ask your cousin pointedly what she has envisioned for your role in this childs life. If she hasnt yet developed a clear picture of what shed like that to be, ask her to do so. Take some time yourself to figure out what youd like to be able to offer, in terms of support, and what sort of things you may need to plan around (such as your work schedule and your other relationships). Then sit down with your cousin and devise a strategy for how your household of three will function.

When it comes to kids, be clear: The best laid plans can easily change. Youmay establish that youll be unavailable to help out with late feedings when you have an early morning the next day, only to find that you cant sleep during those times because just the thought of your bestie struggling alone keeps you upor that the baby typically sleeps peacefully through the night (its possible, mine did!).

Be flexible while also continuing to bear in mind that your role is not that of a co-parent; you shouldnt look the other way when your cousin is having a rough time, but you also mustnt take on 50 percent of the responsibility for caring for this child unless at some point the two of you decide that your role in their life should change.

I couldnt find any books for folks who are looking to be supportive of parents (there are a few on kinship carewhen other relatives and loved ones take on the responsibility of caring for a child that is not their own by birth, but they seem to focus more on trauma and doing the work of parenting oneself), but I do think it would be worth it to check out one or two that were written for parents so that you can learn more about infant development and the various mysteries of babyhood that you havent yet experienced up close. (Id love for our readers to suggest the ones they found helpful in the comments!) You should also take a trip to your local book retailer and look for one that feels right for you, i.e., the tried-and-tested classic What to Expect series versus 2004s The New Basics or The Wonder Weeks, an interesting look at infant life that contextualizes behavior based on developmental leaps. Wishing your family all the best on this special journey!

If you missed Tuesdays Care and Feeding column, read it here.

Discuss this column in the Slate Parenting Facebook group!

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have a 1-year-old. Some acquaintances who are also parents are concerned about and attempting to limit mobile phone/Wi-Fi radiation around their kids. This is nonsense? I cant find anything remotely plausible out there about this, but at the same time, I havent seen an apparent debunking of these theories that I can easily refer to either. And further, how do I deal with this with people when it comes up (assuming Im right that this is not a thing)? I find it hard not to argue evidence, and I can come across arrogant.

Tin Foil Hat

Dear TFH,

Not every debate is worth having, and theres no shortage of other, more easily verifiable threats to your childs safety to worry about. Let your friends obsess over Wi-Fi signal dust if they choose to, but refuse to engage more deeply than offering a Wow, very interesting! before changing the subject. Worst-case scenario: If they belabor the issue, it probably wont be terribly hard to point to something they are exposing their kids to with abundance that is somehow dangerous or dangerous as well.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I have a beautiful, 1-year-old boy. My husband is a fantastic father who is beyond excited to share his world with our son. Were both fortunate to be in careers were passionate about. Still, theyre quite different: Im an academic in a field that involves travel to and fieldwork in remote areas of Africa while he is in the video gaming industry. We also had quite different upbringings: my husband spent a lot of time watching TV and playing video games, while I was mostly outside with my very active family. My husbands generally on board with raising our son more in line with my childhood than with his, but we diverge on one issue.

We both want to share our careers with our son as he gets older, and weve talked about him joining me on fieldwork trips and agree this would be a good thing. However, we have arrived at a stalemate on how my husband can share his career with our son: His idea of moderate exposure to video games is playing only on weekends, while my idea is borrowing hardware from his work and playing when a game Dad worked on is released. This very discussion makes my (already sensitive) husband feel bad about the work he does and takes pride in. His company makes high-quality, nonviolent games. Please help me find a balance that my husband can be excited about but wont harm my sons development.

No Gamer

Dear NG,

Are you saying that you do not even want to allow a video game console to take up permanent residence in a home that is, ostensibly, paid for and cared for with money that is earned in part by the creation of video games? Despite the fact that, by your own description, your husbands company makes high-quality, nonviolent games?

Considering that 1) your husband makes video games for a living, 2) his constant ability to play them as a child did not result in him growing up to be a perpetual adolescent or violent sociopath of some sort (in fact, he both managed to find a career in gaming and a wife who accepts him despite being completely convinced that her own childhood was so far superior to his own), and 3) he has only proposed allowing your son to play games on weekends, Id go so far as to say that your own proposition is completely unreasonable. Especially since you describe your husband as being sensitive about his work.

While I understand being concerned about an overabundance of screen time, your aversion to video games sounds to me more like snobbery than anything else. I hope that I am wrong, and that youre just deeply terrified of some of the bad things that can happen because of overexposure to that sort of content.

Because surely you are aware that there are gamers at every level of our society, including many high-performing children and, most likely, the man with whom you chose to start a family. Furthermore, there are not only risks involved with allowing your child to travel with you to remote locales for your work, there are also those who might find whatever it is you are doing to be distasteful, of questionable merit and/or some other strain of problematic even if you are a native of this particular locale and especially if not.

Im not trying to beat you up, but I want you to consider that the message that you are sending to your husband, in my humble opinion, is that his work sets a poor example for your son and that yours is not only superior in that regard, but so much so that youd take him to the ends of the Earth to ensure that he sees it up close. That may not be what you mean, but that is what you seem to be communicating.

You can still raise your son to be the Gen Z Ross Geller you dream of, even if hes allowed a bit more video game time than youd prefer. He may not even take to them. Not all kids have the screen bug, and hes your child, which means hes likely got a better chance than the average kid at being naturally inclined toward serious academic work that takes him across the globe. But hes his fathers child as well, and he may follow in his footsteps instead. You have to make peace with both that and the fact that those arent bad footsteps to follow. Video games bring a lot of joy into the lives of people in an often cold, cruel world. Hes found a way to work in a field that so many others dream of breaking into. These are admirable things.

Let the kiddo play a reasonable amount of video games on the weekend. As far as making a special exception to the usual rules when his dad has a new piece out? That needs to be in addition to the weekend time. Celebrate those moments as a family, they matter and they wont ruin your boy. Good luck, Mama.

Jamilah

My 14-year-old daughter spent the night with her best friend and I just saw photos of her vaping in the girls room. It is the second infractionshe was caught doing this about six months ago. Im crushed and hate to see her thinking this type of behavior is cool and wanting to experiment. Do I let the other parents know?

Slate Plus members get more parenting advice every week. They also help support Slates journalism.

View original post here:

I Had My Kid Tested for the Gifted Program, and He Didnt Make the Cut - Slate

Welcome toTNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff.

Ill bet money that youre logged into your social media platforms on multiple devices. Phones, tablets, computers its convenient to be able to have your multi-hour social browsing sessions from anywhere. But you should always know what devices your apps are logged into, as a matter of basic digital security. And every now and then, it helps do the technical version of a welfare check, just to see which devices have access to your accounts.

So heres where you can find your logged-in sessions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and how you can log out of them.

Lets start with the big one: Facebook. You can find the specific option under Security and Login, and the Where Youve Logged In list should be near the top of the options. Each session should ideally tell you what type of device youre logged in, and the location. The latter is useful, as often when someone else logs into your device, they arent in your same geographic location. Its very easy to know to log out of something if you can look at it and say Hey, Ive never been in Chicago, so why is someone there logged into my Facebook account?

You can log out of each of these sessions individually by clicking on the ellipsis next to the device in question. This is good if youve, say, forgotten to log out of an old device you no longer own. But if you see that youre logged into multiple devices you dont own in other words, if youre in full crisis, you can choose to log out of all sessions using the option on the bottom of the list.

Despite being in many ways similar to Facebook, Instagram keeps its login information in a separate menu option. Its called Login Activity, which is admittedly much more straightforward. Once youre in this menu, you can confirm whether the most recent login is or isnt you, and underneath you can see each of your other logins.

This menu also offers you the advantage of being able to see exactly where each device was when you (or whomever logged in) accessed the account. As with Facebook, you can log out of each device remotely from this menu (with the exception of the one youre using to access the menu) by clicking the drop-down button next to each devices name. Unlike Facebook, you cant log out of all sessions from here if you must, you can log out of each device individually.

Yet again, the menu for Twitter is in a different location than either of the previous two platforms. Itd sure be nice if these companies could come together and give us standardized menus, but thats a pipe dream. In Twitters case, the option is a submenu nested under the Account setting. Under Data and permissions, youll see an option called Apps and sessions, which is what youre looking for. In addition to your devices or sessions, as theyre called here youll also see what apps youve connected your Twitter to, which is convenient.

Your inactive sessions, meaning the ones on devices youre not actively using, are under the Log out of everything option, which can seem somewhat confusing. But if you click on the device individually, youll be taken to yet another menu where youll see details about when you logged in and where, if such info is attached to the session. From here you can log out of that session individually.

There you go. Now you know how to log out of your devices on the three big social media platforms. Good luck, and may you find no mystery devices logged into your account from Chicago.

Read next: Researchers found a cure for diabetes (in lab mice)

Read more:

How to see where you're logged in on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram - The Next Web

The outbreak of the Covid-19 coronavirus disease has taken the lives of more than 2,770 people with a vast majority of those deaths in China plus a growing number in countries like South Korea, Iran, and Italy and infected more than 80,000 as of February 26. As the world scrambles to contain the public health crisis, global businesses are starting to take a hit, particularly in the technology sector.

China which is the second-largest economy in the world has all but halted its production of consumer goods such as phones, clothing, and automobiles for the past several weeks. The country has taken on unprecedented wartime measures to control the viruss spread, such as placing severe restrictions on some 780 million people and instituting mass quarantines in major cities.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the lockdown on Chinese manufacturing has caused global markets to shudder and is casting an ever-widening shadow on the economy at large. Thats particularly relevant in the tech industry, which depends on Chinese labor to build everything from computer chips to cellphone parts. In recent days, China has started reopening its factories (despite public health concerns) in an effort to restart its economy, but manufacturing sites are running at a far lower capacity than usual.

Its still too early to measure the full financial impact of the virus on the tech industry, but the early signs dont look good. Technology shares, which had been steadily increasing this year even during the beginning of the global outbreak recently took a dive, although they have recovered slightly nearing Wednesdays NYSE closing. The S&P 500 information technology sector, which analysts use to measure total shares in the tech industry, had fallen by over 9.3 percent from last Thursdays close compared to a drop of 7.3 percent across sectors, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Stock markets fluctuate all the time based on a variety of factors, and the coronavirus is impacting stocks across industries, not just tech. But the tech sectors recent plunge is especially concerning given its recent track record of being resistant to any significant hits, and the fact that the top five major tech companies Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google parent Alphabet account for a large portion of the total stock market.

Apple the worlds most valuable tech company said it is reducing its revenue targets this quarter in a rare company advisory released on Monday. Tesla said last week that health epidemics are a risk to its business. Amazon, whose e-commerce business relies on the flow of goods between China, the US, and other countries, has not released any similar warnings but is stockpiling supplier items from China to protect against future disruptions due to the virus. And Chinese companies themselves are feeling the hit, with tech giant Alibaba calling the outbreak a black swan event (as in, unpredictable) on a recent earnings call.

Social media companies which are trying to keep up with a slew of misinformation about the viruss origins and spread are still financially less impacted than companies like Apple since their main line of business isnt selling physical goods. But even Facebook has been affected, setting reduced production goals for its Oculus Quest virtual reality headsets in part due to a slowdown in Chinese manufacturing because of the virus.

And virtually all the major tech companies Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have restricted employee travel to China, either banning or limiting it only to matters of critical importance. Theyre also asking workers returning from China to work from home for up to two weeks.

In some cases, tech professionals in the US are so concerned about the virus that theyre taking other precautions, such as wearing breathing masks and eliminating handshakes in business meetings, as Recode previously reported. For now, there are only four confirmed cases in the San Francisco Bay Area, but some feel these preventative measures are important given the high volume of travel between China and Silicon Valley and concerns that the virus could quickly grow out of control given how it has spread in Asia.

Overall, the economic and social impact the coronavirus is having on the tech industry puts into stark relief the close connection between Silicon Valley and China, not just for manufacturing but for supplying a workforce of highly skilled engineers, investor funds, and academic collaboration.

Outside the workplace, tech companies are pulling out of major global conferences or canceling them altogether. As Recode reported last week, Facebook canceled a 5,000-person global marketing conference in San Francisco. And the worlds largest phone trade show, Mobile World Congress, was canceled after major tech companies like Amazon pulled out over coronavirus concerns.

Here are more specifics on some of the main ways we are seeing coronavirus impact the global economy, particularly in the tech industry.

Virtually every major US tech company that builds physical products like cellphones, computers, or video game consoles relies on a vast Chinese workforce to manufacture products for cheaper than could be done in the US.

In the past few weeks, though, that supply chain, which includes everything from raw parts to finished products, has been fundamentally disrupted.

Factories in China have been shut down. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers who were visiting family in cities outside the main manufacturing hubs for Chinese New Year were quarantined. Some are beginning to return to work, but reports indicate that as of earlier this week, over two-thirds remain stuck. Roads have been blocked, trains halted, and flights canceled.

In its advisory, Apple said Monday that worldwide iPhone supply will be temporarily constrained because its manufacturing sites in China are experiencing a slower return to normal conditions than anticipated as manufacturing sites in the region reopen.

The New York Times reports that even though some factories are starting up again, they are still operating well below capacity. And there are serious public health concerns about whether reopening the factories is the right decision at all, considering the virus continues to spread in China and elsewhere.

Companies are increasingly talking about the threat of the virus in public business announcements. A MarketWatch report found that out of the S&P 500 companies recent earnings calls between January 1 and February 13, 38 percent of transcripts included the term coronavirus at least once.

Another major tech company with its supply chain impacted by the virus is Amazon. Its estimated that more than 40 percent of Amazon sellers are based in China, which means that a large chunk of the products people buy comes from the country. In addition to that, a large portion of US-based sellers source their products from China.

According to a recent Business Insider report, Amazon reached out last week to a number of suppliers for products sold in the US but made in China and encouraged them to stockpile on certain products shipped from China, in anticipation of potential supply chain slowdowns caused by the coronavirus outbreak in the region, according to the outlet.

In response to a question about this practice, Amazon sent Recode the following statement: Out of an abundance of caution, we are working with suppliers to secure additional inventory to ensure we maintain our selection for customers.

Facebook also said the manufacturing of its Oculus Quest headsets is impacted by the outbreak.

Oculus Quest has been selling out in some regions due to high demand, Facebook spokesperson Anthony Harrison wrote in a statement to Recode. That said, like other companies, were expecting some additional impact to our hardware production due to the coronavirus. Were taking precautions to ensure the safety of our employees, manufacturing partners and customers, and are monitoring the situation closely. We are working to restore availability as soon as possible.

Another way the coronavirus outbreak is impacting business is by reducing Chinese consumers demand for consumer electronics.

China is the United States third-largest and fastest-growing market for exports, which means that US companies are increasingly setting revenue goals that rely on Chinese residents buying their products.

Apple in particular made a whopping $52 billion in sales in the last fiscal year by selling its products (mostly iPhones) in the country. With the recent easing of tensions in the US-China trade war, analysts were anticipating that number to grow at a faster rate than it had in previous months.

But now, because of the coronavirus, that could all change. Apple temporarily closed some of its more than 40 stores in the country and is currently still operating some under limited hours.

The company said on an earnings call that there has been very low customer traffic in its stores.

Some business analysts are hoping this will be only a temporary disruption that will slow down in the coming weeks but so far, the virus has proven to be difficult to contain and hard to predict.

The last health crisis to impact trade between China and the rest of the world was SARS in 2003. But at that time, the country wasnt as important a player in the global economy as it is today.

The extent to which US-based tech companies are being impacted by the coronavirus demonstrates how reliant the tech industry is on China.

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Coronavirus is starting to impact the business of Apple, Facebook, and other companies - Vox.com