Social Media

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit over the company’s use of cookies to allegedly track Facebook users’ internet activity even after they had logged off from the platform. In addition, the social media company will be required to delete all of the data it illegally collected from those users. The development was first reported by Variety. The decade-old case, filed in 2012, centered around Facebook’s use of the proprietary “Like” button to track users as they visited third-party websites – regardless of whether they actually used the button – in violation of the federal wiretapping laws, and then allegedly compiling those browsing histories into profiles for selling the information to advertisers. Based on the terms of the proposed settlement, users who browsed non-Facebook websites that included the “Like” button between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, will be covered. “Reaching a settlement in this case, which is more than a decade old, is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders and we’re glad to move past this issue,” a spokesperson for Meta was quoted as saying to Variety. The development comes a year after Meta was ordered to pay $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused Facebook of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) over its use of facial recognition to tag users in photos without their explicit consent. The settlement also arrives as the company has entangled itself in yet another privacy lawsuit from the U.S. state of Texas, which earlier this week sued Meta for “capturing and using the biometric data of millions of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do so.” NOTE:: This article is copyright by thehackernews.com and we are using it for educational or Information purpose only

​Twitter is experiencing a worldwide outage affecting their web platform that prompts users to logout and prevents them from accessing tweets. The outage began at around noon EST and only affects the web/desktop version of Twitter, not the mobile platform. While attempting to use Twitter, the site may redirect you to https://twitter.com/logout/error and display an error message stating that “Something went wrong, but don’t fret – it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”  As you can see from the image below, this page indicates that you are currently logged in to Twitter. However, as you use the site, Twitter will sometimes indicate that you are not logged in and prompt you to do so. At 1:42 PM EST, Twitter’s support account tweeted that they have resolved the errors and users can log into the site again. However, the Twitter status page continues to not show any outages. Update 9/28/21 1:23 PM EST: Added tweet from Twitter’s support account.Update 9/28/21 1:45 PM EST: Replaced tweet with resolution message. NOTE:: This article is copyright by bleepingcomputer.com and we are using it for educational or Information purpose only  

WhatsApp on Friday disclosed that it won’t deactivate accounts of users who don’t accept its new privacy policy rolling out on May 15, adding it will continue to keep reminding them to accept the new terms. “No one will have their accounts deleted or lose functionality of WhatsApp on May 15 because of this update,” the Facebook-owned messaging service said in a statement. The move marks a turnaround from its previous stance earlier this year when the company outlined plans to make the accounts inaccessible completely should users choose not to comply with the data-sharing agreement and opt not to have their WhatsApp account information shared with Facebook. “If you haven’t accepted by [May 15], WhatsApp will not delete your account. However, you won’t have full functionality of WhatsApp until you accept,” the company had previously said. “For a short time, you’ll be able to receive calls and notifications, but won’t be able to read or send messages from the app.” While the revised privacy policy is set to go into effect in exactly a week from today, WhatsApp won’t disable the features for people who don’t accept the changes. Instead, it will continue to push users into accepting the updates with a “persistent reminder” in return for a “limited functionality.” “You won’t be able to access your chat list, but you can still answer incoming phone and video calls,” WhatsApp said. “If you have notifications enabled, you can tap on them to read or respond to a message or call back a missed phone or video call.” Ultimately, users failing to agree to the revised terms even after a few weeks of limited functionality will be prevented from receiving incoming calls or notifications, as well as messages to their devices. Accounts rendered inactive in the process — i.e., users not connected to WhatsApp — are expected to be deleted after 120 days, according to its standard policy for removing inactive accounts from its platform for privacy and security reasons. Originally planned to take effect on Feb. 8, WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy has faced fierce backlash over concerns about the exact kind of information that will be shared with Facebook, forcing it to delay the roll out until May 15. WhatsApp has since clarified that the update does not expand on its ability to share personal user chats or other profile information with Facebook and is instead simply providing further transparency about how user data is collected and shared when using the messaging app to interact with businesses. NOTE:: This article is copyright by thehackernews.com and we are using it for educational or Information purpose only  

YouTube has recovered from a seemingly worldwide outage that prevented videos from loading for roughly an hour. During the outage, many Verge staffers were unable to watch videos, and YouTube confirmed at 7:23PM ET that something was going on: The issue appeared to affect other services that use the YouTube infrastructure too, including YouTube TV and the movies and TV shows you’d purchase through Google TV (formerly known as Google Play Movies & TV). We couldn’t load them. Early in the outage, the YouTube website itself seemed to load just fine, but videos themselves would continuously show the loading wheel. One Verge staffer got a video to load after about a minute. As of about 8:00PM ET, though, we saw error screens like this whenever we tried to watch a video: At 9:13 PM ET, YouTube gave the all-clear: Things seemed to be back as early as 8:30PM ET, but you might have hit a few quirks. At that point, videos played on YouTube’s website seemed to be working as they normally do. On the mobile app, one Verge staffer saw a few error messages, but those would clear with a refresh. YouTube TV worked on mobile for another Verge staffer at that point after he force closed the app. DownDetector showed a truly tremendous number of user reports of problems with YouTube, indicating the problem was widespread — the DownDetector graph peaked with more than 280,000 user reports in less than an hour. Numerous users on Twitter reported that YouTube wasn’t working for them, either, and searches spiked for “is YouTube down.” When reached for comment, YouTube pointed us to the tweet we included in this story. Update November 11th, 8:51PM ET: YouTube seems to be recovering, so we have made numerous changes throughout. Update, 9:16PM ET: Added YouTube’s all-clear.