facebook is evil

The personal data of more than half a billion Facebook Inc. users reemerged online for free on Saturday, a reminder of the company’s ability to collect mountains of information and its struggles to protect these sensitive assets.

The leak includes personal information on 533 million Facebook users, such as phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, bios and in some cases email addresses, Business Insider reported.

“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”

That is an asinine response by FB. It’s like saying we rebuilt the dam after the break so everything is A-OK as before!

Facebook is not ruling out banning Canadians from sharing news on its platform and says it will voluntarily report revenues and promote journalism in the country ahead of what could be a contentious regulatory battle with Ottawa.

The company made the controversial decision to remove news sharing on its platform in Australia just as that country moved to make digital platforms pay news organizations for content.

“It is never going to be something that we would want to do, unless we really have no choice,” said Kevin Chan, Facebook Canada’s public policy director, during testimony at the House of Commons heritage committee on Monday.

Facebook has announced $8 million for journalism in Canada ahead of a hearing at a parliamentary committee next week where the company is expected to face questions about its decision to block users from sharing news in Australia.

The money comes amid a global push by governments and news organizations to make big tech giants like Facebook and Google pay for news that ends up on their platforms.

In a statement on Friday, the company said the cash would go toward extending the Facebook-Canadian Press News Fellowship through to 2024, a boost for the country’s news wire service.

The 30 staffers, whose job was to spot and remove harrowing material on the site, claim they were not given adequate training to deal with the content or access to doctors or psychiatrists while working for Facebook.

As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma.

Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?