Facebook Pivot

Zuckerberg outlines plan to pivot Facebook to "privacy-focused" platform

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday in a 3,000-word note that Facebook plans to rebuild its services around several privacy-focused principles: "private interactions," "encryption," "reducing permanence," "safety," "interoperability" and "secure data storage."

Delete FB Messages

Facebook Messenger gets an unsend feature

You can now delete messages from everyone’s view on Facebook Messenger

By Shannon Liao


Image: Facebook

Facebook has come out with a feature that lets you delete messages from a conversation after you’ve sent them, as previously spotted in leaks. So in case you send the wrong message to the wrong person or make an egregious typo, you’ll be able to remove it in Messenger now.

New FB Signs

Facebook is secretly building LOL, a cringey teen meme hub

Josh Constine

How do you do, fellow kids? After Facebook  Watch, Lasso and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources confirm that Facebook has spent months building LOL, a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips. It’s divided into categories like “For You,” “Animals,” “Fails,” “Pranks” and more with content pulled from News Feed posts by top meme Pages on Facebook. LOL is currently in private beta with around 100 high school students who signed non-disclosure agreements with parental consent to do focus groups and one-on-one testing with Facebook staff.

FB’s Data Sharing

Facebook’s Data Sharing: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation

Dado Ruvic/Reuters

By Nicholas Confessore, Michael LaForgia and Gabriel J.X. Dance

You are the product: That is the deal many Silicon Valley companies offer to consumers. The users get free search engines, social media accounts and smartphone apps, and the companies use the personal data they collect — your searches, “likes,” phone numbers and friends — to target and sell advertising.

FB Latest Leak

Facebook's Latest Leak Is a Timely Reminder That Your Data Is Snagged Even Before You Hit Publish

Facebook's latest data leak is indicative of a broader problem pervading the internet.

By Sam Blum

GETTY IMAGES/JACK TAYLOR

Facebooked capped off its very bad year of data scandals with yet another leak of sensitive user information on Friday. This time, the social network disclosed a bug that made photos of 6.8 million users accessible to third-party developers, the latest sequence in a devastating string of crises for the social network this year.

Facebook Has a New Feature

Facebook Has a New Feature That Might Finally Help You Stop Wasting All Your Time on Social 

Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images
LAURA STAMPLER / FORTUNE.COM 

Facebook is rolling out a new feature that tracks and tells users exactly how much time they spend on its app, TechCrunch reports.

Facebook’s New Portal Device

We Tried Facebook’s New Portal Device (So You Don’t Have To)

Here’s what happened when two Times tech reporters installed Facebook’s new Portal video-calling gadgets in their bedrooms.

Mike Isaac, a Times technology reporter, talking with his colleague Farhad Manjoo through Facebook's new Portal video-calling device. CreditCreditPreston Gannaway for The New York Times

By Mike Isaac and Farhad Manjoo

Facebook’s new gadgets, Portal and Portal Plus, are meant to bring people closer together.

So we — Mike Isaac and Farhad Manjoo, two technology writers for The New York Times — took the $199 and $349 devices for a test run over the last week to see if they could make us feel more connected to each other.

Family Based on Photos

Facebook Files Patent For Technology That Can Identify Your Family Based on Photos

It's all about serving ads to entire families.

By Sam Blum
GETTY IMAGES/CHRISTOPHE MORIN/IP3

Facebook filed a patent for technology that could target entire families with ads. The tech uses photos and various other data collected by the social network.

FB Hacked Again

Private messages from 81,000 hacked Facebook accounts for sale

By Andrei Zakharov
GETTY IMAGES

Hackers appear to have compromised and published private messages from at least 81,000 Facebook users' accounts.

Who has Your Info

How to See Which Facebook Advertisers Have Your Private Info

CAMERON SUMMERSON  @summerson 

It’s widely known that Facebook allows advertisers to specifically target groups of people, but did you know that you can see which advertisers are actively targeting you? You can—and it may blow your mind.

FB Daily Visits Slows

Facebook daily visits growth slows as sales miss forecasts

GETTY IMAGES

Facebook's user growth has slowed and its revenue has missed forecasts, according to the firm's latest results.

An average of 1.49 billion people used Facebook's social network on a daily basis in September, up 9% on last year but below expectations of 1.51 billion.

Messenger Gets a Makeover

Facebook Messenger Gets a Makeover ー Just in Time for Portal

By Carlo Versano

Facebook is unveiling a redesigned, simplified version of its Messenger app that recalls the basic chat service the social media giant released as standalone app in 2014.

Stan Chudnovsky, Facebook's ($FB) head and VP of Messenger, told Cheddar's Hope King that the purpose of the overhaul was to "go back to the roots" with a simple, easy-to-use interface that prioritizes chats between friends.

New FB Chat Device

Facebook Unveils 'Portal' Video Chat Device for the Home

By Alex Heath

Despite a firestorm of privacy scandals that have engulfed the company over the past year, Facebook wants to put its own smart speaker in your home.

Called Portal and Portal+, the two devices are geared towards video calling and feature A.I. technology that can automatically follow a person as they move throughout a room and remove unwanted background noise during a call. Portal features a 10-inch display and costs $199, while Portal+ features a larger 15-inch pivoting display and costs $349.

FB's Oculus Quest

Facebook's Oculus Quest is latest attempt to make VR popular

Dave Lee
North America technology reporter

Facebook has announced Oculus Quest, a virtual reality headset it hopes will rejuvenate the VR industry.

Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg said the device would offer the types of VR experiences that previously required a device to be connected to a high-powered PC.

FB Hack Bigger Than Thought

The Massive Facebook Hack May Have Spread Further Than Facebook

The social network's Single Sign-On feature was easily exploited.

By Sam Blum
GETTY IMAGESNURPHOTO

Last Friday's Facebook hack affecting 50 million users drew all the condemnation and blame you'd expect from another high-profile security breach, but the attack wasn't merely confined to Facebook. Many of the third-party apps that people log into via Facebook were potentially caught up in the mess as well.

New Video Chat Device

Facebook's 'Portal' Video Chat Device to Be Announced Next Week

By Alex Heath

Facebook ($FB) plans to finally unveil its Portal video chat device for the home next week, Cheddar has learned.

FB uses Your Contacts

Facebook Uses the Contacts In Your Phone to Sell Ads to Your Friends

Everything is fodder for advertisers

By Sam Blum
GETTY IMAGESCHRISTOPHE MORIN/IP3

Facebook doesn't just disperse your personal information to its robust network of advertisers to hawk products and services online. According to a report by Gizmodo, it also serves ads to everyone in your mobile address book, provided they use the social network.

FB Hacked; 50M People

Did You Get Logged Out of Facebook? It’s Because 50 Million People Got Hacked

LOWELL HEDDINGS  @lowellheddings 

The bad news for Facebook’s users just won’t end. Today Facebook had to admit that the accounts for 50 million people were somehow accessed by hackers abusing a little-known feature.

Deleting FB

1 in 4 Americans Really Have Deleted Facebook's App, Pew Study Finds

Matt Novak

Mark Zuckerberg checks his phone during the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 13, 2018 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Photo: Getty

Americans have soured on Facebook in the past year, as more people come to terms with the toxic role that the social media platform plays in their lives. A new Pew Research Center survey shows that a large percentage of the population has taken extended breaks from Facebook in the past year, with 26 percent of American users saying that they’ve deleted the app from their phones completely.

FB Rating Users

Facebook begins rating users on how trustworthy they are at flagging fake news

By Jacob Kastrenakes@jake_k
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook has started rating its users’ trustworthiness in order to help the social network know how much to value user reports that a certain news story might be fake. The Washington Post has details on the system and confirmation from Facebook that it’s been put in place. The system certainly sounds a touch dystopian, but Facebook sees it as a valuable tool for weeding out disinformation.