Olivia Solon

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social network's power and control competitors by treating its users' data as a bargaining chip. Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook users' data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over the companies it partnered with.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social network’s power and control competitors by treating its users’ data as a bargaining chip, while publicly proclaiming to be protecting that data, according to about 4,000 pages of leaked company documents largely spanning 2011 to 2015 and obtained by NBC News.

The Irish Data Protection Commission has opened a formal investigation into a data breach that affected nearly 50 million Facebook accounts, which could result in a fine of up to $1.63 billion. The breach, which was discovered by Facebook engineers on Sept 24, gave hackers the ability to take over users’ accounts. It was patched on Sept 27, the company said.

The Facebook data of up to 87 million people – 37 million more than previously reported – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company has revealed. This larger figure was buried in the penultimate paragraph of a blogpost by the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, published April 4, which also provided updates on the changes Facebook was making to better protect user information.

Twitter has asked for help in tackling the rampant harassment, bots, misinformation and polarisation in a more strategic way so that it can improve the “health” of conversation on the platform, said the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey.

More than 20 internet pioneers and leaders including the “father of the internet”, Vint Cerf; the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee; and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have urged the Federal Communications Commission to cancel its vote to repeal network neutrality, describing the plan as “based on a flawed and factually inaccurate” understanding of how the internet works. “The FCC’s rushed and technically incorrect proposed order to repeal net neutrality protections without any replacement is an imminent threat to the internet we worked so hard to create.

A coalition of more than 70 civil rights groups have written to Facebook demanding that the company clarifies its policies for removing content and alleging that it has repeatedly removed posts documenting human rights violations. In a letter addressed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the rights groups – including the ACLU, Center for Media Justice, SumOfUs and Color of Change – express deep concern over the censorship, particularly when posts are removed at the request of police. When Facebook censors content that depicts police brutality, it sets a dangerous precedent for marginalized communities “Your company is taking on an increasingly central role in controlling media that circulates through the public sphere. News is not just getting shared on Facebook: it’s getting broken there,” the letter said. “We are deeply concerned with the recent cases of Facebook censoring human rights documentation, particularly content that depicts police violence.”

The campaign groups referenced the deactivation of Korryn Gaines’ account during a standoff with police, the suspension of live footage from the Dakota Access pipeline protests, the removal of historic photographs such as “napalm girl”, the disabling of Palestinian journalists’ accounts and reports of Black Lives Matter activists’ content being removed. “When the most vulnerable members of society turn to your platform to document and share experiences of injustice, Facebook is morally obligated to protect that speech,” said the letter.

Facebook must provide refunds for purchases made in apps and games by children should they or their parents request it, a California court has ruled.

The decision means that hundreds of thousands of people across the US could legally claim back money from the social network. It’s the culmination of a class action lawsuit brought against the social network in February 2012 by two children and their parents over purchases of the discontinued virtual currency Facebook Credits, now known as Facebook Payments, made using the parents’ credit cards. The currency was designed as a site-wide form of payment for virtual goods within games like Farmville and Bejeweled.

An algorithm has been developed to automatically recognise human gestures or activities in videos in order to describe what is taking place.

MIT postdoc Hamed Pirsiavash and his former thesis advisor Deva Remanan from the University of California at Irvine have used natural language processing techniques in order to improve computers' ability to search for particular actions within videos -- whether it's making tea, playing tennis or weightlifting.

The activity-recognising algorithm is faster than previous versions and is able to make good guesses at partially completed actions, meaning it can handle streaming video. Natural language processing has been applied to computer vision in order to break down the different components involved in any action in the same way that sentences are divided down into different elements.

The researchers essentially came up with a type of grammar for human movement, dividing up one main action into a series of subactions. As a video plays, the algorithm constructs a set of hypotheses about which subactions are being depicted and where, and ranks them according to probability. As the video progresses, it can eliminate hypotheses that don't conform to the grammatical rules, which then dramatically reduces the number of possibilities.

Pirsiavesh believes that the system may have medical applications, including checking that physiotherapy exercises are being carried out correctly or the extent to which motor function in patients with neurological damage has returned.

A common charger for mobile phones sold in the European Union should be developed in order to reduce waste and hassle for consumers, according to members of the European Parliament voting on an update to radio equipment laws.

The draft Radio Equipment Directive outlines a range of harmonized rules for bringing "radio equipment," which includes mobile phones and modems, on the market. The rules aim to make sure that the increasing range of devices don't interfere with each other and respect health and safety requirements. Part of the directive focused on reducing waste.

MEPs called for a renewed effort to develop a common charger for certain categories of radio equipment -- particularly mobile phones. They amended the draft law to stipulate that the ability to work with common chargers will be an essential requirement for radio equipment. It will be up to the European Commission to decide which specific types of radio equipment will have to meet the requirement. Rapporteur Barbara Weiler said that the directive is "an efficient tool to prevent interference between different ratio equipment devices."