Your Google Home can now stream music to any Bluetooth speaker

Google today announced a small but important update for its Google Home devices: you will now be able to control all of your Bluetooth speakers and stream music to them right from your Google Home devices.

Until now, you could only use your Google Home’s Bluetooth capabilities to stream music to them (from your phone, for example). But now, you’ll be able to use your Google Home Mini which doesn’t exactly have the most impressive built-in speakers, to control the Bluetooth-enabled bookshelf speakers you have in your living room.

Indeed, as Google notes in today’s announcement, the company decided to add this feature because its Google Home Mini users requested it. The regular Google Home does have a pretty passable speaker, after all.

To enable this new feature, open the Google Home app on your phone or tablet, look for your device settings and then the “default music speaker” menu. There, you’ll now see an option to pair a Bluetooth speaker.

Since that Bluetooth speaker doesn’t have to be in the same room as your Google Home, you’ll now be able to extend Home’s multi-room capabilities to rooms that don’t have a Home in them, too, and play music or podcasts on all of your speakers and Google Home devices simultaneously.

Since that speaker doesn’t talk back to your Home, though, you obviously won’t be able to use it to give voice commands to the Google Assistant. But it’s probably good sound you’re after — not more Google Assistant mics in your home.

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How to Remote Control Your Apple TV With an iPhone or iPad

Apple currently produces two models of Apple TV: a regular HD version (our review) and a new 4K flavor (we’ve compared it to competitors). If you lose your hardware remote, your iPhone or iPad might be the only way you can control your set-top box.

Both run tvOS, a fork of iOS that lets you run apps on your TV, and you can control both using your iPhone or other iOS device. You’ll need to pair the two before you can do so, but the benefits extend beyond simple convenience.

Why Control Apple TV With an iPhone or iPad?

If you’ve used the Apple TV for any length of time, you’ll know that the remote is slippery. Made of smooth aluminium, glass, and a small textured touch pad, Apple’s remote is constantly sliding down cracks in the sofa. It’s small enough that you could vacuum it up or throw it away by mistake, and you’d never know what happened to it.

In the event something happens to your remote, your only means of control is another iOS device. If you don’t fancy spending $60 on a replacement remote, you should probably pair a few devices before something happens. It’s always better to pair remotes and not need them than to lose your main remote control and be left with a paperweight.

How Do I Pair an iPhone With Apple TV?

It’s easy to pair your iPhone with your Apple TV:

1. On your Apple TV, navigate to Settings > Remotes and Devices > Remote App and Devices.
2. Unlock your iPhone, iPad, or other iOS device and bring it close to your Apple TV.
3. Wait for the Apple TV prompt to appear on your screen, then tap Pair.
4. Authorize your iPhone by typing the PIN displayed by the Apple TV.

When you see a tick, your device is paired and ready. You can pair as many remotes as you like. Simply repeat the process on your iPad, iPod Touch, or another iPhone.

My iPhone and Apple TV Won’t Pair, What Now?

Your Apple TV and iPhone will only be able to communicate if they’re on the same network, so the first place to check is the network status of both devices. If your router broadcasts on two bands, make sure both devices are connected to the same one. The SSID (also known as network name) should be identical on both.

You can also try updating both devices to the latest firmware. On the iPhone you’ll find this option under Settings > General > Software Update. On the Apple TV it’s at Settings > System > Software Updates. If both devices are already up to date, you may want to try power cycling your Apple TV under Settings > System > Restart.

Finally, you can try a more drastic measure: re-pairing your device by deleting it and starting over. To do this, on your Apple TV navigate to Settings > Remotes and Devices > Remote App and Devices then select the device you’re trying to pair and hit Un-pair Device. Now follow the instructions above to re-pair.

How Do I Control Apple TV With My iPhone?

You don’t need to download an app to control your Apple TV. Provided you have updated to the latest version of iOS, just add the Remote shortcut to Control Center:

1. Navigate to Settings > Control Center > Customize Controls on your iPhone.
2. Under More Controls add the Apple TV Remote to your list of shortcuts.
3. Exit the Settings app and swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal Control Center.
4. Tap the Apple TV button to launch the control panel.

You can then control your Apple TV by swiping the main navigation panel as you would your hardware remote. You’ll notice this software remote has the same controls as your main remote, but it lacks volume control. This is because your iOS device doesn’t have an infrared blaster to communicate with your TV.

You can also control your Apple TV using two of Apple’s official remote apps: iTunes Remote and Apple TV Remote. The latter is the most recent official addition, but they both work the same way:

1. Launch your chosen remote app then wait for the list of available devices to update.
2. Tap on your Apple TV, then input the PIN displayed on your TV.
3. Control your Apple TV using the software remote by dragging your fingers around the navigation area.

While these apps work perfectly well, native iOS control using Control Center (above) is more convenient and doesn’t require an additional download.

How Do I Type on Apple TV Using iPhone Keyboard?

If you’ve successfully paired your Apple TV as per the instructions above, you can simply launch the remote from Control Center to type. When you select a text field, the keyboard will automatically appear on screen. Tap the navigation area to cancel typing. If you’re using one of the downloadable apps, it works in the same way.

Not only does this make searching Netflix and the App Store even easier, it makes logging into apps and services quicker too. If you use a password manager, you can even paste your passwords into the iPhone keyboard text entry field.

How Do I Turn On an Apple TV Without a Remote?

You can use any paired device or app to start your Apple TV. Simply swipe up to reveal Control Center and tap the Apple TV logo shortcut you created earlier. Tap anywhere on the navigation panel to wake up your Apple TV.

How Do I Pair a New Remote With My Apple TV?

If you bought a new Apple TV remote because your old one disappeared or doesn’t work anymore, you can pair it by turning it on near your Apple TV and waiting. If nothing happens, press and hold Volume Up and Menu until the remote enters pairing mode, then move it close to the Apple TV.

Top Tip: Charge Your Apple TV Remote!

Roughly three times a year my Apple TV remote will start acting up. During this time it won’t register full swipes and I can’t scrub through any media that’s playing. It’s at this point I remember that there’s a battery inside that I never think to charge. Plug your Apple TV remote in for an hour every few weeks to avoid this problem!

For everything you need to know about using your Apple TV, check our our Apple TV setup and troubleshooting guide.

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How to Turn Any PC or Laptop Into a Chromebook or Chromebox

Princeton study finds very few affiliate marketers make required disclosures on YouTube and Pinterest

Convincing humans to buy products is a massive business called marketing, and few areas of marketing are growing as fast as influencer marketing. Influencers on platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube can command prodigious fees based on their audience size and engagement: some data suggests that a single video on YouTube by a top influencer can command as much as $300,000.

While top influencers often have direct partnerships with product companies, others with smaller audiences often take advantage of affiliate networks to build their revenues. These networks allow an influencer to take a small cut of any sales that are generated through their unique affiliate link, and their flexibility means that influencers can prioritize products that they believe best match their audience.

This industry is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission, which has set out a series of rules requiring paid affiliate links to be disclosed to users. There’s just one problem according to a new analysis by Princeton researchers: very little content on sites like YouTube and Pinterest with affiliate links actually disclose their monetization.

Computer scientists Arunesh Mathur, Arvind Narayanan, and Marshini Chetty compiled a random sample of hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube and millions of pins on Pinterest. They then used text extraction and frequency analysis to investigate URLs located in the descriptions of these items to determine whether the URL or any redirects behind it connected to an affiliate network.

For all the growth in affiliate marketing, the researchers found that less than 1% of videos and pins in their random sample had affiliate links attached to them. Some categories had a significantly higher percentage of affiliate links though, such as science and technology videos on YouTube which averaged 3.61% and women’s fashion on Pinterest, which had a rate of 4.62%.

What’s more interesting is that content with affiliate links was statistically more engaging than videos without affiliate links. The researchers found that affiliated videos had longer run times as well as more likes and view counts, and a similar pattern was seen on Pinterest. The incentives around affiliate marketing then are clearly working.

The researchers next investigated the text of content with affiliate links and analyzed whether they made any disclosures about their economics to users. Among content that had affiliate links, 10.49% of YouTube videos and 7.03% of pins on Pinterest had disclosures. Worse, the disclosure language recommended by the FTC was only included on roughly 2% of affiliated content across the two platforms.

Given the NLP and basic machine learning methodology of the paper, these numbers should be perceived as a lower bound on disclosures. Nonetheless, it is clear that much of the influence economy that exists on these platforms remain cloaked from everyday users, despite being in clear violation of FTC guidelines and rules.

These results raise a series of challenging product and policy questions for startup companies with user-generated content. In the wake of the 2016 election where fake news factories built viral content and generated serious advertising revenues, social networks like Facebook have had to confront the tradeoff between a maniacal focus on quantitative engagement like page views and time on site and the quality of that engagement. If affiliated content does have higher engagement statistically as this study showed, that poses a dilemma for companies looking to boost revenue while also improving engagement quality at the expense of quantity.

For instance, the authors of the study suggest that products like YouTube should have better native features to disclose affiliate sponsors. Placing disclosures though could dampen enthusiasm for some clearly high-engagement content. How then can companies build a framework for building ethical policies that follow FTC requirements while also ensuring their products reach the right metrics?

Finally — and much harder to measure — is evaluating the effect of disclosures on affiliate revenue. Do people click on links less if they know they were placed there because of marketing economics? If proper disclosures dampen the influencer industry, that could put a brake on its breakneck growth.

Such policy and product challenges aren’t simple to answer, but the intensity of the problem is only going to increase with more and more money flowing into the influencer economy. This research clearly shows that there is a wide gap between what the government requires, and what affiliate marketers actually do that needs to be rectified.

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Hire by Google makes it easier to find the right job candidates

Hire by Google, the company’s service for recruiters and hiring managers, is getting a couple of new features today that’ll make it easier to find the right candidates among the pool of potential employees who previously applied to a position at a company.

The idea here is to make better use of a company’s existing candidate database, given that the candidates in it are clearly interested in working for the company, even if they weren’t necessarily a great fit for a previously open position.

“For every person hired, a company typically engages with 250 candidates,” Omar Eduardo Fernández, a product manager  on the Hire team, writes in today’s announcement. “Often, many of the 249 that don’t get hired are a great fit for future openings—but companies haven’t always had an easy way to identify past candidates that might be a good match for new jobs.”

To better mine this pool of past job applicants, the new so-called ‘candidate discovery” looks at the job description, title and location of a job ad and then matches that to a list of past candidates. As Google notes, Hire uses the company’s search smarts to better understand the recruiter’s intent. That means that the service can easily parse a job’s location, for example, even if it isn’t explicitly specified in a ‘location’ field but only part of the text.

While we’ve seen quite a few announcements around Google’s overall job search efforts in recent months, most of these focused on helping job searchers find potential positions. Now, it looks like Google is ready to put the focus back on Hire by Google (a.k.a. Google Hire, depending on who you ask), so I expect we’ll hear quite a bit more about the service in the near future.

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9 Smart Mac App Filters That You’ll Need Someday

Love smart folders in Finder on Mac? You’ll be glad to know that a few more Mac apps support smart groupings. Smart folders, albums, playlists, etc. are quick-access views that display search results to match specific criteria. You can use them to filter items in a snap. We’ve rounded up a few custom smart sets to get you started.

Smart Albums in Photos

You can create smart albums in the Photos app by clicking on File > New Smart Album. In the dialog box that appears, you’ll see three dropdown menus in a row. Select the right options within them and you have the condition in place to filter out the photos you want.

If you want to add more conditions for filtering, click on the Plus button next to an existing condition to get started. Be sure to change the Any box if you want the filter to only pick up items that match all criteria. Add an appropriate name for the smart album for easy identification, and then hit the OK button to wrap up.

The new smart album will show up under My Albums in the sidebar. You can drag and drop smart albums inside folders to organize them. Now, let’s get to those albums you might want to create.

Note: The process for creating smart groups in Contacts and smart mailboxes in Mail is more or less the same. Thus, we won’t walk you through the whole process again in the upcoming sections.

1. Photos That Didn’t Sync With iCloud

iCloud sync can run into issues at times, leaving you with a mishmash of photos that have synced with iCloud and others that haven’t. This smart album will help you identify the latter across all albums. While creating it, leave the first two dropdown menus alone. Set the third one to unable to upload to iCloud Photo Library.

2. Favorite Photos in Specific Albums

When you “like” or favorite a photo, it shows up under Library > Favorites. If that section appears crowded and you can’t find what you’re looking for, this filter narrows down your search. It displays photos marked as favorites from an album of your choice.

While creating the smart album, leave the default condition (Photo is favorite) as is and add this second one to it: Album is [Name]. Replace [Name] with the album from which you want to display your favorites.

3. Your Photos With a Specific Person

Imagine you want to erase a person from your digital memories by deleting photos featuring that person. You can find said person’s photos with this next smart album.

Create the album by setting your condition to Person is or Person includes followed by the name of the person whose photos you want to isolate.

You’ll have to select the person’s name from the third dropdown menu, but it won’t show up there if you haven’t matched it to a face first. To do that, visit the People section from the sidebar, hover on the relevant face, and add a name to it with the Name option.

Now let’s say you want to gift someone a photo book or a calendar with a few choice photos of the two of you. To find photos to choose from, set up a smart album with a face filter as you did above. But this time add a second condition: Person is [Your Name].

Smart Groups in Contacts

Click on File > New Smart Group to start creating a new smart contact group and set up your conditions for filtering contacts.

4. Contacts With a Birthday or Anniversary Coming Up

Gift giving and party planning is so much easier when you remember birthdays and anniversaries well in advance. Let the Contacts app remind you.

Create a smart group that goes with this condition: Birthday is in the next 1 month. For anniversaries, create a separate group and select the Anniversary option instead of Birthday.

You can select various labels from the dropdown menus to tweak your criteria. For example, you can also set the condition to Anniversary is within 2 weeks or Birthday is within 10 days.

5. Contacts Living in the Same City

Have you ever missed out on meeting a friend during a trip because you forgot to plan ahead? Did you forget he lived in the city you were visiting? You can prevent that from happening again.

Use a smart group to round up contacts who live in cities you visit often. Set it up with the condition City is [City Name]. The next time you plan your trip to a particular city, take a quick look at its smart group. You’ll know at a glance whom to send a “let’s catch up” message.

6. Coworkers You Want to Meet Outside Work

Do you work on a remote team? With a little tweak, the smart group we created above can help you organize meetups for coworkers who happen to live in your city.

All you have to do is add a second condition to filter contacts who belong to the your workplace. For this you can use a condition like Email contains @Website.com, where Website.com is your company or team’s official domain name.

For coworkers who share your interests, add those interests to the Note section when you’re creating contacts. With such notes in place, you can filter people who can join you for a shared activity such as a dance class, a movie, or a football game.

To make this work, set up a smart group with these conditions:

• Address contains [Locality Name] or ZIP is [ZIP Code]
• Note contains [Keyword]

Smart Mailboxes in Mail

You’ll find the “create” option for smart mailboxes listed as New Smart Mailbox in the Mailbox menu.

7. Urgent Work Emails

Do you find yourself sidetracked by unimportant emails while checking work emails that need immediate action? Set up a smart mailbox to display only the kind of emails you consider both urgent and important to get work done. You can filter emails:

• From one or more people with: From Contains Person@Company.com
• From a particular domain with: From Contains @Company.com
• With a particular keyword in the subject line with: Subject contains [Keyword]

Move this special mailbox to the top of the Smart Mailboxes section in the sidebar and check only that when you’re in a hurry.

8. Emails From a Specific Contact Group

Let’s say you want to read emails from ex-colleagues or from contacts whose emails you love. Add those people to a single contact group or a smart group in the Contacts app, and then use a smart mailbox to filter emails from that group. Here’s the condition you can use: Sender is member of group [Group Name].

9. Emails You Need to Reply To

Create a smart mailbox with the first condition as Message was not replied to. Now, do you want to filter emails from a certain sender, within a certain time span, or with a particular subject line? You’ll have to set the second condition accordingly. Here are a few examples for it:

• From contains @Website.com
• Date received is between 7 and 10 days ago
• Subject contains [Keyword]

Improve Your Mac Apps With Smart Groups

You know the best part about smart albums, mailboxes, and contact groups? You don’t have to worry about updating their contents. If the corresponding app finds an item that fits the bill, it automatically adds that item to the correct smart set.

It doesn’t matter how much data you have on your Mac’s hard drive. With smart folders and the like, finding relevant bits of data becomes quick and painless. Spend a few minutes setting up some of those smart searches today!

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It was not consent, it was concealment

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP and also chair of NADPO, when we asked what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

And the risks of attempting to hoodwink consent out of your users are about to step up sharply too, at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” he adds.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things (as Facebook used to say), doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.

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It was not consent, it was concealment

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP and also chair of NADPO, when we asked what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

And the risks of attempting to hoodwink consent out of your users are about to step up sharply too, at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” he adds.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things (as Facebook used to say), doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.

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12 Free Pedometer Apps That Are Better Than Fitbit

Do you get your 10,000 steps every day? To answer this question, many people will immediately look to their wrist, where a Fitbit (or another fitness tracker) will immediately provide an answer.

These glorified pedometers now offer features ranging from basic step/calorie counting (Fitbit Zip), to models with full smartwatch capabilities (Fitbit Versa).

Fitbits are now recognized as an essential tool for anyone interested in losing weight, staying active, or becoming more physically fit. But in reality, that’s simply not true.

You Don’t Need a Fitbit…

There’s no arguing the facts. Fitbit has created a targeted product with great features that can enable some people to change their habits for the better and lead healthier lives.

But there’s also no arguing this fact: you don’t need a Fitbit to see these results. Why?

Fitbits don’t make you healthier. Evidence from scientific studies suggests that wearable activity trackers don’t have lasting results on people’s habits. And while some studies occasionally show a slight increase in user’s active minutes per day, it’s rarely enough to actually have a lasting impact on someone’s health or fitness.

Fitbit’s measurements aren’t as accurate as they’d like you to believe. See also the ongoing lawsuit regarding the accuracy of Fitbit’s heart rate tracker, and reasons your Fitbit isn’t tracking all of your steps.

Fitbits are expensive. You don’t need to spend between $70 and $250 to count your steps when there are other alternatives available for free!

…But You Do Need to Exercise

This article isn’t meant to discourage anyone from walking more and sitting less. After all, current research suggests a sedentary lifestyle is one of the biggest risks for heart disease, stroke, obesity, and death.

Your best protection against many diseases and health risks is to regularly participate in physical activity focused on endurance (150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous cardiovascular activity per week), strength, and flexibility.

Of course, changing your habits can be hard. This is why so many people are drawn to Fitbit. The product offers gentle reminders to get moving, a way to track how much exercise you’ve done in a given week, and gives you a sense of achievement when you meet your goals.

Yet most people already carry their phones with them every day, and they can track your steps using built-in motion sensors. Since we already know that wearables aren’t as accurate as they promise, and that improving your physical activity is about making overall changes in your lifestyle rather than reaching a magic number of steps, an inexpensive app can be your best bet to move towards a healthier lifestyle.

So before you spend a ton of money on a wearable band, why not look at the apps on this list first?

The Best Built-In Pedometer Apps

Want the easiest solution of all? These apps are designed to work directly with your phone.

1. Apple Health

Apple Health is a comprehensive app automatically installed on every iPhone 5s and newer. The app is a way to keep track of all your health and fitness data from a multitude of devices and apps. However, it also has a simple Steps feature that tracks your activity throughout the day.

2. Google Fit

Unlike its Apple counterpart, Google Fit is not automatically installed on your smartphone. But after installing, it’s incredibly easy to track activity of any kind. You can also track your calories burned, set goals, and check your stats online on Google Fit’s web portal.

Download: Google Fit for Android | Web (Free)

The Best Basic Pedometer Apps

If you want a pedometer app that offers basic functionality without draining your battery life, these apps are excellent options.

3. Stepz

Stepz is a simple app for people who just need a little extra motivation to get walking. The app offers reminders to get moving throughout your day, and shows simple visualizations of your activity habits so you can track your improvement over time. Plus you don’t even need to open the app to see how you’re doing, because your daily steps show automatically in your app’s icon badge.

Download: Stepz for iOS (Free)

4. Accupedo

Accupedo is an ideal choice for Android and iOS users who want an easy way to check their activity levels throughout the day. The app offers a widget for your home screen, daily reminders and summary emails, and an intelligent algorithm that can distinguish between walking and other activities that may cause your phone to move.

Download: Accupedo for iOS | Android (Free)

The Best Visual Pedometer Apps

If you respond better to visual presentations of data than numbers, these apps are for you.

5. StepsApp Pedometer

StepsApp offers several different visualizations of your health data, including customizable calendar views, line graphs, and a daily widget. The app offers GPS functionality for workout sessions, and a mode that tracks wheelchair pushes in lieu of steps.

Download: StepsApp Pedometer for iOS (Free)

6. Argus

Argus arguably has one of the most innovative pedometer app designs. The appealing honeycomb look of the app’s home screen offers you quick insight into a number of health-related data points. These include steps taken, calories burned, heart rate, caffeine intake, your daily calorie intake, and more.

Download: Argus for iOS | Android (Free)

The Best Route-Tracking Pedometer Apps

Interested in both how far you walk and where exactly you’ve ended up along the way? These apps offer GPS tracking functionality, but be aware that these apps may drain your battery faster than their GPS-free counterparts!

7. Map My Walk

Map My Walk (owned by Under Armour) is one of the best-known apps on this list. The app tracks your walking distance, pace, and calories burned as well as your route. You can then share your route with friends, or explore other walking routes near you for new adventures.

Download: Map My Walk for iOS | Android (Free)

8. Walker

Walker has similar features to Map My Walk without the large focus on community interactions. You can see overviews of your activity at a glance, as well as a daily step count, and activate your GPS tracking for dedicated walks.

Download: Walker for iOS (Free)

The Best Community-Oriented Pedometer Apps

Want to really step up your step count? Challenge yourself by competing with other users in these pedometer apps.

9. Fitbit

Some of the best motivation Fitbit provides is its ability to compete with friends and family members across the globe. Believe it or not, you don’t need to purchase a Fitbit to join in.

Instead, download the app and then select No Fitbit Yet when creating an account. You will then be guided through the MobileTrack setup and can log your steps to compete in challenges using your phone’s sensor.

Download: Fitbit for iOS | Android (Free)

10. Quped

Want the fun of competing with others without having to interact with people directly? Quped is an app developed by researchers at the University of Glasgow. Instead of comparing you with individual people, you can see how your stats stack up with norms for people of the same age and gender as you.

Download: Quped for iOS (Free)

The Best Pedometer Apps That Reward You

Sure, being healthy is its own reward. But with these apps you can also earn reward points, discounts, or donations to charity simply by walking more. If these apps don’t inspire you to get a few extra steps in each day, we’re not sure what will.

11. Unicef Kid Power

Want a great way to teach your child about being physically active and giving back to those in need? The Unicef Kid Power app can use a dedicated wristband or your child’s phone to track activity in engaging and entertaining ways. Steps earned and challenges completed result in points that are then turned into food donations organized by Unicef.

Want a similar app targeted at adults? Try Charity Miles.

Download: Unicef Kid Power for iOS | Android (Free)
Download: Charity Miles for iOS | Android (Free)

12. Winwalk

Winwalk is a basic pedometer app that transforms your steps into points, which you can then redeem for gift cards and discounts to major brands. Every 100 steps is equal to one coin, with a maximum of 100 coins per day. Rewards available are based on your location.

Download: Winwalk for Android (Free)

Other Location-Based Rewards Apps

• Carrot (sponsored by select provincial governments in Canada) for iOS | Android
• Bounts (UK) for iOS | Android
• Walgreens: (USA) Link to other apps such as Runkeeper, Google Fit, iHealth, and more.
• Sweatcoin (US, UK, Ireland) for iOS

Getting Healthy Without a Fitbit

While Fitbits are fun gadgets to have, they’re definitely not necessary for improving your health. Instead, try out one of these apps for a few weeks (or longer) to see if it provides enough motivation for you to change your physical activity habits.

Still not convinced? There are a few questions you should ask yourself before you buy a Fitbit.

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A closer look at Waymo’s new self-driving Jaguar I-PACE

Waymo teamed up with Jaguar Land Rover to develop the first electric, fully self-driving premium car. Alongside five other models — including a small car, an SUV, the Pacifica minivan, the firefly prototype, and a semi-truck — the premium I-PACE’s large, fast-charging battery is a good fit for Waymo’s forthcoming self-driving ride service.

Waymo hopes to grow its I-PACE fleet to 20,000 over the next couple of years.

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15 of the Best Amazon Originals You’ve Never Heard Of

Waze officially launches its ad program for small businesses

With the launch of Waze Local, Google-owned navigation app Waze is offering small businesses a way to market themselves to consumers  on the road.

Waze has allowed larger brands to buy ads for years, and it’s been beta testing Waze Local since 2016.

“It’s been a gradual strategy,” said Matt Phillips, who leads the Waze Local team. “We wanted to get it right.”

He added that the key is understanding the needs of small businesses — like the fact that most of them are more interested in driving traffic to their physical stores than their websites.

As Phillips explained it, Waze Local’s “core ad format” is the branded pin, which will appear on users’ screens as they drive near a store’s location. For some advertisers, such as coffee shops, a branded pin might persuade drivers to make a quick detour before they continue their commute. For others, the pin might not lead to an immediate action, but it still helps build awareness.

In addition, Waze Local offers advertisers the opportunity to promote their listings in Waze search results, and to run what the company calls a zero-speed takeover — a big banner ad across the top of the screen, which only appears when the driver has come to a complete stop. And advertisers can see real-time data on how their campaigns are performing.

Waze will charge for ads on a CPM basis, and Phillips said businesses running the most basic campaigns could pay as little as $2 per day.

If you’re worried about the app getting overrun with ads, it’s worth remembering that Waze was already offering these formats to larger advertisers. So you may just see more ads now, and more of them are likely come from local businesses. (Phillips also said Waze will never show more than three branded pins at one time.)

During the beta test, Waze Local ended up driving an average 20 percent increase in navigations to the businesses buying ads. One of the early advertisers was Kung Fu Tea, which saw more than 5,500 drivers navigating via Waze Local to 16 Kung Fu Tea locations over a three-month period.

When asked if Google might eventually connect Waze Local to its other ad products, Phillips acknowledged that Waze does share some anonymized data with Google around things like traffic, but he said, “Our focus is to build this platform for small and medium businesses … We’re happy with the roadmap as is.”

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Waze officially launches its ad program for small businesses

With the launch of Waze Local, Google-owned navigation app Waze is offering small businesses a way to market themselves to consumers  on the road.

Waze has allowed larger brands to buy ads for years, and it’s been beta testing Waze Local since 2016.

“It’s been a gradual strategy,” said Matt Phillips, who leads the Waze Local team. “We wanted to get it right.”

He added that the key is understanding the needs of small businesses — like the fact that most of them are more interested in driving traffic to their physical stores than their websites.

As Phillips explained it, Waze Local’s “core ad format” is the branded pin, which will appear on users’ screens as they drive near a store’s location. For some advertisers, such as coffee shops, a branded pin might persuade drivers to make a quick detour before they continue their commute. For others, the pin might not lead to an immediate action, but it still helps build awareness.

In addition, Waze Local offers advertisers the opportunity to promote their listings in Waze search results, and to run what the company calls a zero-speed takeover — a big banner ad across the top of the screen, which only appears when the driver has come to a complete stop. And advertisers can see real-time data on how their campaigns are performing.

Waze will charge for ads on a CPM basis, and Phillips said businesses running the most basic campaigns could pay as little as $2 per day.

If you’re worried about the app getting overrun with ads, it’s worth remembering that Waze was already offering these formats to larger advertisers. So you may just see more ads now, and more of them are likely come from local businesses. (Phillips also said Waze will never show more than three branded pins at one time.)

During the beta test, Waze Local ended up driving an average 20 percent increase in navigations to the businesses buying ads. One of the early advertisers was Kung Fu Tea, which saw more than 5,500 drivers navigating via Waze Local to 16 Kung Fu Tea locations over a three-month period.

When asked if Google might eventually connect Waze Local to its other ad products, Phillips acknowledged that Waze does share some anonymized data with Google around things like traffic, but he said, “Our focus is to build this platform for small and medium businesses … We’re happy with the roadmap as is.”

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10 Ways KDE Is a Better Linux Desktop Than GNOME

With so many popular Linux operating systems invested in the GNOME ecosystem (such as Ubuntu and Fedora), it’s easy to overlook KDE.

But there are many reasons to give this desktop environment a try. If you do, you might walk away with a new favorite way to use Linux.

1. An Interface That’s What You Want It to Be

The KDE Plasma desktop behaves like plasma, as in it molds into whatever shape you like. The default layout feels familiar if you’re coming from Windows, but the resemblance is only skin deep. You can move or delete every component on the bottom panel. You can create more panels, place them on any side of the screen, or do without them entirely.

There is an abundance of widgets that serve as your building blocks. Turn the default task manager into a dock. Swap out the digital clock for an analog one. And even then, you’re just getting started.

Want big window borders? Want no window borders? Want to roll windows up into the titlebar like you did in the pre-Mac OS X days? Want to alt-tab through windows like cards? Want your close button on the left instead of the right? More than any other desktop, Plasma is what you want it to be.

2. The Same Is True for Apps

KDE apps are no less customizable. At first, they follow the traditional desktop software paradigm. You have a titlebar, a menubar, and toolbars filled with icons and options. Thing is, KDE lets you change all of that.

Want your apps to have a traditional menubar underneath the title? That’s the default. But if you view that text as a waste of space, you can tuck that menu inside a button in the titlebar. Or you can have a macOS or Ubuntu Unity-style global menu at the top of the screen.

Want to type in an empty text window with no toolbars of any kind? You’re free to get rid of everything. Alternatively, you can keep toolbars but change all of the icons. This way the options you need most are the ones within easy reach.

KDE software settings aren’t limited to appearance. Many apps keep options that developers on other desktops often feel aren’t worth supporting. This can make settings confusing to navigate, but there’s a greater chance you can make an app do what you want.

3. KDE Software Is Powerful

KDE Plasma feels like a powerful desktop. The Dolphin file manager isn’t lacking in speed, features, or options. The Gwenview image viewer displays thumbnails in a hurry and can perform edits. The system as a whole doesn’t feel bogged down by simple tasks. While many GNOME apps are burning resources trying to re-do the basics, Plasma feels ready to take on the harder tasks.

digiKam is arguably the best photo manager the Linux desktop has to offer. The same can be said for Kdenlive and video editors. Want to create digital artwork? You might want to consider Krita. KDE has one of the few open source office suites attempting to rival LibreOffice: Calligra. KDE Connect is the best way to sync your smartphone with your Linux PC.

Then there’s Krunner, an immensely fast way to search for files and launch apps.

For years now, KDE has suffered from the lack of a competent web browser. Now that Falkon (formerly QupZilla) has become an official KDE project, this is changing.

4. KDE Is Surprisingly Fast

Among Linux ecosystems, it’s fair to think of both GNOME and KDE as heavy. They’re complete desktop environments with plenty of moving parts compared to lighter alternatives. But when it comes to which is faster, looks can be deceptive.

Despite its glossy themes and widgets galore, KDE feels to me like a snappier experience. Under GNOME, whether it’s due to extensions, search indexing, or some other shenanigans, I’m not surprised to find the entire system occasionally slowing down. On the Plasma desktop, I’ve had apps crash, but they don’t slow down the entire computer while they’re at it.

I’m not saying KDE is objectively faster. There are simply too many aspects to consider, ranging from the hardware you’re using to the way your distro packages each desktop environment. But my impression has changed since I first switched to Linux during KDE’s 4.0 days. GNOME may look like a lighter system, but to me, it no longer feels that way.

5. More Parts of Your System Are Accessible

Changing the login screen in GNOME is not a straightforward task. When I switch to an alternate theme, I tend to accept that the lock screen also won’t quite match.

In KDE, you can change the login screen via System Settings. You can tweak the lock screen as well. While you’re at it, why not tinker with non-KDE elements like the GRUB bootloader? Not having to open a terminal or edit files in a text editor makes this easier to do in KDE than GNOME.

6. KDE Has Better App Integration

App integration is a weak spot for GNOME. If an app fully integrates with the GNOME desktop, then it likely looks out of place in other environments (except for perhaps elementary OS). Older GNOME apps that haven’t embraced its current design language look out of place too. The same is true of non-GNOME apps that still use the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+), such as GIMP and LibreOffice.

This is much less of an issue in KDE. Not only do modern KDE apps look fine, but so do many apps that haven’t received an update in years. GTK apps like GIMP and LibreOffice, which use traditional menubars, also fit right in on the Plasma desktop.

7. It’s Easy to Get More Stuff on KDE

In GNOME, when you want more extensions, you go to GNOME Extensions in a browser. This is similar to how things work in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

KDE has the KDE Store, but you don’t have to open a browser to get there. Integration is baked directly into your desktop. It’s not limited to extensions, either. You can also download widgets and desktop wallpapers the same way.

The Plasma desktop may seem complex at times, but it’s features like this that make it simpler than the alternatives. Unlike other desktops, you don’t have to open a browser and research where to find add-ons for your desktop.

Instead, these things are a mouse-click away.

8. KDE Isn’t as Influenced by Trends

Computers have changed over the years. Many desktop interfaces have changed to suit touchscreens and mobile devices. If you were happy with how computers used to be, these can be frustrating times.

KDE Plasma is what you make it. The default layout feels like a traditional Windows experience. Apps still have menubars. Windows have titlebars. You can alter the interface to look like elementary OS, macOS, or a Chromebook, but that degree of change is your decision to make.

The same is true of apps. KGet is a standalone download manager. KMail is a good old-fashioned email client. If you want to use an RSS reader without needing an online account, Akregator has you covered.

If your idea of progress is gaining new features and functionality without giving up the old way of doing things, KDE can make for a comfortable home.

9. KDE Plasma Is Built on Impressive Code

The KDE Plasma desktop and apps are all written in Qt. This is a platform-agnostic language that is also heavily used on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. This makes it easy to port KDE technologies.

Plasma is also in some ways a more advanced creation than most other desktops. Not only can you easily tailor the interface to your own tastes, but developers can easily tweak Plasma to suit different form factors. Plasma Mobile, which targets smartphones, doesn’t require developers to create so much code from scratch.

This is part of the reason the Purism plans to have Plasma Mobile up and running before GNOME on its crowdfunded Librem 5 phone. KDE has also created Kirigami, the interface used in apps like Discover that can adjust to smaller screens.

10. KDE Embodies Freedom

Providing users with freedom is at the core of the KDE ethos. There have been stumbles along the way. The transition to KDE 4 several years ago did not go smoothly.

But on the whole, KDE empowers people to use their desktop how they want and to give them the tools to do so. The community also openly advocates for privacy and the values of free software in a way other projects often shy away from. As KDE notes in its vision for the future:

“In a world where our privacy is increasingly threatened, we wanted to emphasize its importance. Freedom without the right to privacy is no freedom at all.”

Most other desktop interfaces leave you waiting for someone else to implement the feature or change you want to see. In Plasma, there’s a good chance you can make this happen on your own. It’s all just a matter of finding out where the setting is buried.

The Best Reasons to Use KDE Over GNOME

This much freedom can be distracting, I’ll admit. And there’s something to be said for providing software with great design, even if that comes at the cost of features and options. It takes time to tweak your desktop to feel just right, time that could be spent on other things. The features that make KDE great aren’t immediately obvious.

But the more you use KDE, the more you learn how to do, and the more you find to love.

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Facebook makes its privacy, data downloading and deletion settings easier to find

With Facebook facing a wave of public backlash over how it has handled user data over the years — a backlash that was kicked off two weeks ago with the revelation that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had worked on targeted election campaigns using personal and private Facebook data — the company today announced a new set of changes to help users find and change their privacy settings, as well as download and delete whatever data has been collected through Facebook’s network of social media services.

To be clear, many of these settings and features already existed in Facebook, but now Facebook is making them significantly clearer for the average user to find and use. It’s possible that Facebook would have had to do a lot of this work anyway in light of the new GDPR requirements that are coming into place in Europe.

What today’s changes do not do is provide any indications that Facebook plans to do anything different in terms of what information it’s gathering and using to run its service, and its bigger, profitable business. (Indeed, even upcoming changes to its terms of service, which will include more clarity on Facebook’s data policy, will contain no changes in it, the company says: “These updates are about transparency – not about gaining new rights to collect, use, or share data,” writes Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer.)

We’ve seen a lot of people already downloading their Facebook data in the last week or so (without today’s update), and the impression you get is that they are generally coming away shocked by the amount of information that had been amassed through Facebook’s various apps across web and mobile. That in itself — combined with more scrutiny from regulators over how data is collected, used, and shared, and bigger changes that Facebook is making in terms of how it works with third-party apps that link into the Facebook platform (which CEO Mark Zuckberg announced last week) — will hopefully lead to more meaningful changes on that front.

For the time being, however, the main idea here is that if you choose to stay and use Facebook, caveat emptor, and proceed armed with more control. Facebook highlights several areas where changes are being put in place:

1. User controls. Facebook said that it has redesigned its settings menu for mobile, consolidating all of the primary controls on one screen. This is already a major change, given that previously they were spread across 20: a gating factor that would have meant it was hard to find what you were trying to change, or perhaps leading many to give up altogether. It’s also making it clear what can and cannot be shared with apps, specifically: “We’ve also cleaned up outdated settings so it’s clear what information can and can’t be shared with apps,” writes Egan. The fact that it seems there were some out of date elements in the menus highlights that this might not have been Facebook’s biggest priority up to now.
2. Privacy shortcuts. For those who don’t want to dive into their settings, Facebook said it is also going to put in a new item into its menu, directly linking users to privacy settings. Privacy Shortcuts, Facebook said, will come by way of a few taps and will let people add in two-factor authentication; composite access to what you’ve shared via Facebook with the option of deleting if you choose; controls for your ad settings, which will also include an explanation of how ads work on Facebook for those who might want to know more; and a link to help you control what and how you share on the site — that is, the setting of “public, friends only, and friends of friends.” Again, that control has been in place for years already at Facebook, but many don’t know how to access it, or what it means. Putting it a little more front and center might change that.
3. Downloading and deleting Facebook data. The aim here is to make it easier for people to do both if they want. Access Your Information will be a secure link that people can use to collect this, and it will make it easier for people to do both. Will the ease and openness make it less likely that users will decide to leave Facebook altogether? That remains to be seen.

The news comes in the wake of CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week posting an acknowledgement of Facebook’s role in the scandal, and a pledge to improve the company’s practices with regards to third-party apps and how Facebook works with them, and what data it will provide in the future, which he also followed up with a full-page apology printed in several newspapers. It has not been enough for some, and #deletefacebook has become a trending concept, with the company’s stock taking a nosedive in the last two weeks.

 

 

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Facebook just lost another user — New Zealand’s privacy commissioner

Mark Zuckerberg’s friend count continues to tick down in the face of a major data misuse scandal griping the company. The latest individual to #DeleteFacebook is no less than the privacy commissioner of New Zealand.

Writing in The Spinoff, John Edwards accuses Facebook of being non-compliant with the New Zealand Privacy Act — and urges other New Zealanders to follow his lead and ditch the social network.

He says he’s acting after a complaint that Facebook failed to provide a user in New Zealand with information it held on them.

“Every New Zealander has the right to find out what information an agency holds about them. It is a right of constitutional significance,” he writes. “Facebook failed to meet its obligations under the Privacy Act, and when given a statutory demand from my office to produce the information at issue so that I could discharge my statutory duty to the requester to review it, Facebook initially refused to provide it, and then asserted that Facebook was not subject to the New Zealand Privacy Act, and was therefore under no obligation to provide it.

“Our investigation was not able to proceed, and we notified the parties that while we were able to conclude that Facebook’s actions constituted an interference with privacy, and a failure to comply with its obligations both to the requester, and to my Office, there was nothing further we could do.”

Facebook’s strategy of arguing it is not under the jurisdiction of privacy laws in international markets is a standard play for the company which instructs its lawyers to argue it is only subject to Irish data protection law, given its international HQ is based in Ireland.

(NB: The geographical distance between Ireland and New Zealand is roughly 18,600km — a vast physical span that of course presents no barrier to Facebook’s digital business making money by mining personal data in New Zealand.)

The company’s ‘your local privacy rules don’t apply to our international business’ strategy appears to be on borrowed time, in Europe at least — with some European courts already feeling able to deny Facebook’s claim that Ireland be its one-stop shop for any/all international legal challenges.

The EU also has a major update to its data protection framework incoming, the GDPR, which will apply from May 25 — and which ramps up the liabilities for companies ignoring data protection rules by bringing in a new penalty regime that scales as high as 4% of a organizations global turnover (for Facebook that could mean fines as large as $1.6BN, based on the ~$40.6BN it earned last year — per its 2017 full year results).

And that’s all before you consider the huge public and political pressure now being brought to bear on the company over data handling and user privacy, as a result of the current data misuse scandal. Which has also wiped off billions in share value — and led to a bunch of lawsuits.

“We applied our naming policy and today have identified Facebook as non-compliant with the New Zealand Privacy Act in order to inform consumers of the non-compliance, the associated risks, and their options for protecting their data,” adds Edwards, joining the anti-Facebook pile-on.

“Under current law there is little more I am able to do to practically to protect my, or New Zealanders’ data on Facebook. I will continue to assert that Facebook is obliged to comply with New Zealand law in relation to personal information it holds and uses in relation to its New Zealand users, and in due course a case may come before the courts, either through my Office, or at the suit of the company.”

He goes on to suggest that the 2.5 million New Zealanders who use Facebook could consider modifying their settings and postings on the platform in light of its current non-compliant terms and conditions — or even delete their account altogether, linking to a page on the commission’s own website which explains how to delete a Facebook account.

So, er, ouch.

In response to the commissioner’s actions, Facebook has decided to try to brand the country’s privacy commissioner himself as, er, hostile to privacy…

A Facebook spokesperson emailed us the following statement:

We are disappointed that the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner asked us to provide access to a year’s worth of private data belonging to several people and then criticised us for protecting their privacy. We scrutinize all requests to disclose personal data, particularly the contents of private messages, and will challenge those that are overly broad. We have investigated the complaint from the person who contacted the Commissioner’s office but we haven’t been provided enough detail to fully resolve it. Instead, the Commissioner has made a broad and intrusive request for private data. We have a long history of working with the Commissioner, and we will continue to request information that will help us investigate this complaint further.

This of course is pure spin — and a very clunky attempt by Facebook to shift attention off the nub of the issue: Its own non-compliance with privacy laws outside its preferred legal jurisdictions.

Frankly it’s a very risky PR strategy at a time when it really has become impossible for Facebook to deny quite how comfortable the company was, up until mid 2015, to hand over reams of personal information on Facebookers to third party users of its developer platform — without requiring these external entities gain individual level consent (friends could ‘consent’ for all their friends!).

Hence the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The non-compliance of Facebook with European data protection laws was in the spotlight yesterday, during an oral hearing in front of the UK parliamentary committee that’s looking into the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook data misuse scandal — as part of a wider enquiry into online disinformation and political campaigning.

Giving testimony to the committee as an expert witness Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the co-founder of PersonalData.IO — a startup service designed to help people control how their personal information is accessed by companies — recounted how he had spent “years” trying to obtain his personal information from Facebook.

Dehaye said his persistence in pressing the company eventually led it to build a tool that lets Facebook users obtain a subset list of advertisers who hold their contact information — though only for a rolling eight week period.

Downloaded FB data also gives you insight into whom else has data on you (used to run custom audiences). Have never engaged with 75% of these… pic.twitter.com/dQPjIcI8CW

— Christian Hernandez (@christianhern) March 26, 2018

“I personally had 200 advertisers that had declared to Facebook that they had my consent to advertise. One of them is Booz Allen Hamilton, which is an information company,” Dehaye told the committee. “I don’t know how [BAH got my data]. I don’t know why they think they have my consent on this. Where that information comes from. I would be curious to ask.”

Asked whether he was surprised by the data Facebook held on him and also by the company’s reluctance to share this personal information, Dehaye said he had been surprised they “implemented something” — i.e. the tool that gives an eight week snapshot.

But he also argued this glimpse is illustrative because it underlines just how much Facebook still isn’t telling users.

“They implicitly acknowledge that yes they should disclose that information,” said Dehaye, adding: “You have to think that these databases are probably trawled through by a tonne of intelligence services to now figure out what happened in all those different circumstances. And also by Facebook itself to assess what happened.”

“Facebook is invoking an exception in Irish law in the data protection law — involving, ‘disproportionate effort’. So they’re saying it’s too much of an effort to give me access to this data. I find that quite intriguing because they’re making essentially a technical and a business argument for why I shouldn’t be given access to this data — and in the technical argument they’re in a way shooting themselves in the foot. Because what they’re saying is they’re so big that there’s no way they could provide me with this information. The cost would be too large.

“It’s not just about their user base being so large — if you parse their argument, it’s about the number of communications that are exchanged. And usually that’s taken of a measure of dominance of a communication medium. So they are really arguing ‘we are too big to comply with data protection law’. The costs would be too high for us. Which is mindboggling that they wouldn’t see the direction they’re going there. Do they really want to make that argument?”

“They don’t price the cost itself,” he added. “They don’t say it would cost us this much [to comply with the data request]. If they were starting to put a cost on getting your data out of Facebook — you know, every tiny point of data — that would be very interesting to have to compare with smaller companies, smaller social networks. If you think about how antitrust laws work, that’s the starting point for those laws. So it’s kind of mindboggling that they don’t see their argumentation, how it’s going to hurt them at some point.”

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