An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Coming out of the ongoing Google antitrust trial, an internal Apple presentation has surfaced (via The Verge) in which the company called Android a "massive tracking device." The presentation in question was regarding a push within Apple to start "Competing on Privacy." The slides, made in January 2013, dove into how Apple's competitors (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft primarily) handled privacy matters and user data. A "privacy timeline" includes some 2000s and 2010s events that made headlines regarding privacy, such as Google's Street View cars recording private Wi-Fi networks and Instagram's aim to use user photos in its ads, as well as Google's privacy policy move to combining user data across services. Apple went on to compare how its products handle privacy differently from Google and others.

The presentation culminates in the full-page statement [...] where Apple says that "Android is a massive tracking device." The slideshow is partially redacted and abridged, which leaves out the context of this statement, but it's certainly a bold way to talk about a competitor. Of course, all mobile devices do a whole lot of tracking, whether it's Android or iOS.

Pete Syme reports via Insider: A British software company is giving Meta 30 days to stop using the name Threads in the UK because it owns the trademark. Threads Software Limited says its lawyers wrote to the Facebook and Instagram parent company on Monday. If Meta doesn't stop using the name Threads, Threads Software Limited says it will seek an injunction from the courts.

The British company trademarked Threads in 2012 for its intelligent messaging hub, which can store a company's emails, tweets, and voice over internet protocol phone calls in a cloud database. In a press release, it said it had declined the four offers that Meta's lawyers made to purchase its domain name "threads.app." Then when Meta launched Threads, its social media app designed to compete with Elon Musk's X, the British company says it was removed from Facebook. John Yardley, the managing director of Threads Software Limited, said the business "faces a serious threat from one of the largest technology companies in the world."

"We recognize that this is a classic 'David and Goliath' battle with Meta," said Yardley. "And whilst they may think they can use whatever name they want, that does not give them the right to use the Threads brand name."

Meta, in a blog post: To comply with evolving European regulations, we are introducing a new subscription option in the EU, EEA and Switzerland. In November, we will be offering people who use Facebook or Instagram and reside in these regions the choice to continue using these personalised services for free with ads, or subscribe to stop seeing ads. While people are subscribed, their information will not be used for ads.

People in these countries will be able to subscribe for a fee to use our products without ads. Depending on where you purchase it will cost $10.5/month on the web or $13.75/month on iOS and Android. Regardless of where you purchase, the subscription will apply to all linked Facebook and Instagram accounts in a user's Accounts Center. As is the case for many online subscriptions, the iOS and Android pricing take into account the fees that Apple and Google charge through respective purchasing policies.

"Threads is officially a success," writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland. 9to5Mac reports: During Meta's quarterly earnings call today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered an update on the Threads, saying that the service has "just under" 100 million monthly active users. When Threads launched in July, the app quickly rocketed to having 100 million users within just a few days. While that growth is believed to have slowed down, as expected when something takes off so quickly, Zuckerberg says the service is currently at almost 100 million active users. Note the difference in terms, too. Having 100 million "users" is one thing, while having 100 million monthly active users is quite different -- and more impressive.

The number is also impressive when you consider that Threads isn't available to the millions of people who live in the European Union. As noted by The Verge, Zuckerberg also reiterated today that Meta's goal is to turn Threads into a "billion-person public conversations app" that is "a bit more positive" than some of the competition. According to Zuckerberg, Threads is on the way to achieving that goal.

Meta Platforms was sued by California and a group of more than two dozen states over claims that its social-media platforms Instagram and Facebook exploit youths for profit and feed them harmful content. From a report: The suit, filed in federal court in California, adds to growing scrutiny of social media giants over how they serve their youngest users.

"Mark Zuckerberg is making good on his promise to accelerate the use of Threads," reports Business Insider: The Meta CEO insisted in July that the app was not in its final form. "I'm highly confident that we're gonna be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow," Zuckerberg said. Since then, Threads has rolled out a host of major new features, including a web version, keyword search, voice posts, and the ability to edit posts, even as it avoids promoting news. Smaller things, too, like being able to follow updates in individual threads at the tap of a bell icon, a way to mass follow people mentioned in a post, and even tag people's Instagram accounts, are now available... More Threads features are said to be on the way, like polls.
But Insider also reports that "As the app has matured quickly in recent weeks, users have started to return and downloads have continued to rise." So far in October, Threads has hovered around 33 million daily active users and 120 million monthly active users, according to data from Apptopia, up from about 25 million daily users and 100 million monthly users in July... Since the app launched on July 6, it's been downloaded 260 million times, Apptopia data shows, with downloads in September almost double the downloads in August...

Although the entire team working on Threads remains small by Meta standards, around 50 people, the company was surprised by the interest in the app and "really wants it to work," an employee said. To that end, Threads is now being integrated to an extent with Facebook and Instagram, two of the most popular apps in the world. There is a direct link to Threads on each user's Instagram page, a post on Threads can be sent in Instagram DMs, and as of this week, Threads is being promoted within the Instagram app feed via a small carousel of select posts under the header "Threads for you...."
It's not just Instagram, according to BGR. "If you've been posting some especially strange messages Threads, thinking that only the few people who follow you will see them, I have some bad news for you..." As spotted by TechCrunch, users on Facebook have noticed something new on their News Feed: content from Threads. It appears that Meta is now showing Facebook users a new "For You from Threads" section on the News Feed that contains recommended content from the sibling social media platform.

The Washington Post tells the story of a veteran political operative and a former army intelligence officer hired to help keep in power the president of the west African nation Burkina Faso: Their company, Percepto International, was a pioneer in what's known as the disinformation-for-hire business. They were skilled in deceptive tricks of social media, reeling people into an online world comprised of fake journalists, news outlets and everyday citizens whose posts were intended to bolster support for [president Roch Marc] Kaboré's government and undercut its critics. But as Percepto began to survey the online landscape across Burkina Faso and the surrounding French-speaking Sahel region of Africa in 2021, they quickly saw that the local political adversaries and Islamic extremists they had been hired to combat were not Kaboré's biggest adversary. The real threat, they concluded, came from Russia, which was running what appeared to be a wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing Burkina Faso and other democratically-elected governments on its borders.

Pro-Russian fake news sites populated YouTube and pro-Russian groups abounded on Facebook. Local influencers used WhatsApp and Telegram groups to organize pro-Russian demonstrations and praise Russian President Vladimir Putin. Facebook fan pages even hailed the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary network run by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the late one-time Putin ally whose Internet Research Agency launched a disinformation campaign in the United States to influence the 2016 presidential election... Percepto didn't know the full scope of the operation it had uncovered but it warned Kaboré's government that it needed to move fast: Launch a counteroffensive online — or risk getting pushed out in a coup.

Three years later, the governments of five former French colonies, including Burkina Faso, have been toppled. The new leaders of two of those countries, Mali and Burkina Faso, are overtly pro-Russian; in a third, Niger, the prime minister installed after a July coup has met recently with the Russian ambassador. In Mali and the Central African Republic, French troops have been replaced with Wagner mercenaries...

Percepto's experience in French-speaking Africa offers a rare window into the round-the-clock information warfare that is shaping international politics — and the booming business of disinformation-for-hire. Meta, the social media company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says that since 2017 it has detected more than 200 clandestine influence operations, many of them mercenary campaigns, in 68 countries.
The article also makes an interesting point. "The burden of battling disinformation has fallen entirely on Silicon Valley companies."

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

Meta will now let you block Instagram from collecting your data across the apps and websites you visit. From a report: The company says that it's expanding the ability to disable this kind of tracking to Instagram, allowing you to review which businesses are sharing information with Meta, disconnect specific activity, or clear the collected information. You can now find this feature, called Activity Off-Meta Technologies, within the platform's Accounts Center. It was previously only available for Facebook. Meta receives information from third-party websites that use its business tools, such as the Meta Pixel, which tracks users on the web and allows Meta to serve personalized ads on its platforms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: New York State officials on Wednesday unveiled a bill to protect young people from potential mental health risks by prohibiting minors from accessing algorithm-based social media feeds unless they have permission from their parents. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Letitia James, the state attorney general, announced their support of new legislation to crack down on the often inscrutable algorithms, which they argue are used to keep young users on social media platforms for extended periods of time -- sometimes to their detriment. If the bill is passed and signed into law, anyone under 18 in New York would need parental consent to access those feeds on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and other social media platforms that use algorithms to display personalized content. While other states have sought far-reaching bans and measures on social media apps, New York is among a few seeking to target the algorithms more narrowly.

The legislation, for example, would target TikTok's central feature, its ubiquitous "For You" feed, which displays boundless reams of short-form videos based on user interests or past interactions. But it would not affect a minor's access to the chronological feeds that show posts published by the accounts that a user has decided to follow. The bill would also allow parents to limit the number of hours their children can spend on a platform and block their child's access to social media apps overnight, from midnight until 6 a.m., as well as pause notifications during that time.

The bill in New York, which could be considered as soon as January when the 2024 legislative session begins, is likely to confront resistance from tech industry groups. The bill's sponsors, State Senator Andrew Gounardes and Assemblywoman Nily Rozic, said they were readying for a fight. But Ms. Hochul's enthusiastic support of the bill -- she rarely joins lawmakers to introduce bills -- is a sign that it could succeed in the State Capitol, which Democrats control. A second bill unveiled on Wednesday is meant to protect children's privacy by prohibiting websites from "collecting, using, sharing, or selling personal data" from anyone under 18 for the purpose of advertising, unless they receive consent, according to a news release. Both bills would empower the state attorney general to go after platforms found in violation.

An anonymous reader shares a report: You could be entitled to a small chunk of a $16 million class action settlement against anime streaming service Crunchyroll. The Sony-owned company settled a data privacy lawsuit this week that will result in about $30 settlements for individuals impacted, according to firm behind the class action. The complaint, filed in September 2022, claims that Sony shared individual Crunchyroll viewing information with third-party sites without user's permission. That means Google or Facebook might have seen your anime watch history without your knowledge. It's a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which makes it illegal to video streaming services to disclose personally identifiable information without the individual's consent. Crunchyroll denies wrongdoing.

Utah became the latest state Tuesday to file a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company is "baiting" children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits. From a report: TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app's safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit. "We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary," Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City. Arkansas and Indiana have filed similar lawsuits while the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide whether state attempts to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok violate the Constitution.

Amanda Hoover reports via Wired: As few as 2 percent of New York City's previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known platforms, with some still seemingly being listed on Airbnb itself. The number of short-term listings on Airbnb has fallen by more than 80 percent, from 22,434 in August to just 3,227 by October 1, according to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog group that tracks the booking platform. But just 417 properties have been registered with the city, suggesting that very few of the city's short-term rentals have been able to get permission to continue operating.

The crackdown in New York has created a "black market" for short-term rentals in the city, claims Lisa Grossman, a spokesperson for Restore Homeowner Autonomy and Rights (RHOAR), a local group that opposed the law. Grossman says she's seen the short-term rental market pick up steam on places like Facebook since the ban. "People are going underground," she says. New York's crackdown on short-term rentals has dramatically reshaped the vacation rental market in the city. People are using sites like Craigslist, Facebook, Houfy, and others, where they can search for guests or places to book without the checks and balances of booking platforms like Airbnb. Hotel prices are expected to rise with more demand. After the rule change, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company would be shifting attention away from New York, which was once its biggest market.

"I was always hopeful that New York City would lead the way -- that we would find a solution in New York, and people would say, 'If they can make it in New York, they can make it anywhere,'" Chesky said during an event in September. "I think, unfortunately, New York is no longer leading the way -- it's probably a cautionary tale."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled (PDF) last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law. The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.

Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that "Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people." Further, she alleged that Facebook's ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to "lookalike audiences." Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook "discriminates against women and older people," by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads. This, Liapes alleged, caused harm by preventing her from signing up for deals that "often change and may expire" -- deals which she said were disproportionately being advertised on Facebook to younger and/or male audiences. As evidence, Liapes pointed to ads that Facebook did not serve to her -- allegedly because advertisers used the platform's Audience Selection and Lookalike Audience tools to exclude her -- as an older woman [...]. "As a result, she had a harder time learning about those products or services," Liapes' complaint alleged. [...]

Initially, a court agreed with Facebook's arguments that Liapes had not provided sufficient evidence establishing Facebook's intent or demonstrating harms caused, but rather than amend her complaint, Liapes appealed. Then, in what tech law expert Eric Goldman on his blog called a "shocking conclusion," a California court last month reversed that initial decision, finding instead that Facebook's ad-targeting tools are not neutral, discriminate against users by age and gender, and are not immune under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Goldman -- who joked that Liapes wanting more Facebook ads is "a desire shared by almost no one" -- said that the potential impact of this ruling goes beyond possibly shaking up Facebook's ad system. It also seemingly implicates every other ad network by finding that "any gender- or age-based ad targeting for any product or service (and targeting based on any other protected characteristics) could violate the Unruh Act." If the ruling is upheld, that could "have devastating effects on the entire Internet ecosystem," Goldman warned. "The court's single-minded determination to find a valid discrimination claim under these conditions casts a long and troubling shadow over the online advertising industry," Goldman wrote in his blog. "Who needs new privacy laws if the Unruh Act already bans most ad targeting?"

"The opinion never expressly says that the Unruh Act regulates ad targeting," Goldman told Ars. "It takes some reading between the lines to reach that conclusion."

Adi Robertson reports via The Verge: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1394, a law that would punish web services for "knowingly facilitating, aiding, or abetting commercial sexual exploitation" of children. It's one of several online regulations that California has passed in recent years, some of which have been challenged as unconstitutional. Newsom's office indicated in a press release yesterday that he had signed AB 1394, which passed California's legislature in late September.

The law is set to take effect on January 1, 2025. It adds new rules and liabilities aimed at making social media services crack down on child sexual abuse material, adding punishments for sites that "knowingly" leave reported material online. More broadly, it defines "aiding or abetting" to include "deploy[ing] a system, design, feature, or affordance that is a substantial factor in causing minor users to be victims of commercial sexual exploitation." Services can limit their risks by conducting regular audits of their systems. As motivation, the bill text cites whistleblower complaints that Facebook responded inadequately to child abuse on the platform and a 2022 Forbes article alleging that TikTok Live had become a haven for adults to prey on teenage users.

An economist testified that Google made billions of dollars in extra ad revenue starting in 2017 — by making a secret change to its auction algorithm that bumped their revenues up 15%. Bloomberg reports: Michael Whinston, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Friday that Google modified the way it sold text ads via "Project Momiji" — named for the wooden Japanese dolls that have a hidden space for friends to exchange secret messages. The shift sought "to raise the prices against the highest bidder," Whinston told Judge Amit Mehta in federal court in Washington.

Google's advertising auctions require the winner to pay only a penny more than the runner-up. In 2016, the company discovered that the runner-up had often bid only 80% of the winner's offer. To help eliminate that 20% between the runner-up and what the winner was willing to pay, Google gave the second-place bidder a built-in handicap to make their offer more competitive, Whinston said, citing internal emails and sealed testimony by Google finance executive Jerry Dischler earlier in the case...

About two-thirds, more than 60%, of Google's total revenue comes from search ads, Dischler said previously, amounting to more than $100 billion in 2020.
In 2021 Google was also accused of running "a secret program to track bids on its ad-buying platform," according to the New York Post (citing reporting by the Wall Street Journal). A Texas-led antitrust suit accused Google "of using the information to gain an unfair market advantage that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to a report."

And the Post's article also mentioned "an alleged hush-hush deal in which Google allegedly guaranteed that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of advertising deals."

Meta is planning to lay off employees on Wednesday in the unit of its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division focused on creating custom silicon, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: Employees were informed of the layoffs in a post on Meta's internal discussion forum Workplace on Tuesday. The post said they would be notified about their status with the company by early Wednesday morning, one of the sources said. Reuters was not able to determine the extent of the cuts to the silicon unit, called Facebook Agile Silicon Team, or FAST, which has roughly 600 employees, according to the other source. The FAST unit is tasked with developing custom chips to power the augmented and virtual reality hardware produced by Meta's Reality Labs division. Meta currently makes a line of mixed reality headsets called Quest and smart glasses designed with Ray-Ban eyeglass maker EssilorLuxottica that can stream video and speak with wearers through a new artificial intelligence virtual assistant.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Would people pay nearly $14 a month to use Instagram on their phones without ads? How about nearly $17 a month for Instagram plus Facebook -- but on desktop? That is what Meta wants to charge Europeans for monthly subscriptions if they don't agree to let the company use their digital activity to target ads, according to a proposal the social-media giant has made in recent weeks to regulators. The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent -- jeopardizing its main source of revenue.

Meta officials detailed the plan in meetings in September with its privacy regulators in Ireland and digital-competition regulators in Brussels. The plan has been shared with other EU privacy regulators for their input, too. Meta has told regulators it hopes to roll out the plan -- which it calls SNA, or subscription no ads -- in coming months for European users. It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.

Anyone who has used H&R Block's tax return preparation services since 2015 "may have unintentionally helped line Meta and Google's pocket," reports Gizmodo: That's according to a new class action lawsuit which alleges the three companies "jointly schemed" to install trackers on the H&R Block site to scan and transmit tax data back to the tech companies which then used elements of the data to engage in targeted advertising.

Attorneys bringing the case forward claim the three companies' conduct amounts to a "pattern of racketeering activity" covered under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a tool typically reserved for organized crime. "H&R Block, Google, and Meta ignored data privacy laws, and passed information about people's financial lives around like candy," Brent Wisner, one of the attorneys bringing forward the complaint said.

The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California this week, stems from a bombshell Congressional report released earlier this year detailing the way multiple tax preparation firms, including H&R Block, "recklessly" shared the sensitive tax data of tens of millions of Americans without proper safeguards. At issue are the tax preparation firms' use of tracking "pixels" placed on their websites. These trackers, which the lawsuit refers to as "spy cams" would allegedly scan tax documents and reveal a variety of personal tax information, including a filer's name, filing status, federal taxes owed, address, and number of dependents. That data was then anonymized and used for targeted advertising and to train Meta's AI algorithms, the congressional report notes.
The attorneys argue that H&R Block, Meta, and Google "explicitly and intentionally" entered into an agreement to violate taxpayers' privacy rights for financial gain, according to the article. The suit seeks refunds and punitive damages.

The Guardian reports: Travel website Booking.com has left many hotel operators and other partners across the globe thousands of dollars out of pocket for months on end, blaming the lack of payment on a "technical issue". The issue is widespread in Thailand, Indonesia and Europe among hoteliers who are venting their frustrations in Facebook groups as rumours swirl about the cause of the failure to pay. Usually, if a customer makes a booking for a hotel through the website Booking.com and elects to pay upfront, the site takes the payment and passes it on to the hotel operator, minus a commission. Booking.com's partners have reported issues receiving payments since July, and in some cases months earlier. While Booking.com has continued taking payments from customers, the company has not always passed on the amount owed to hotel operators and others whom the Guardian has spoken to.
The article adds that last month Hungary's consumer watchdog agency "launched a probe into the company's failure to pay hotel operators in the country and raided Booking.com's local office, after local reporting on the issue."

In a statement to the Guardian, Booking.com acknowledged the "frustration" of customers affected by "an ongoing technical issue." They also said "the system errors that affected the payments have now been corrected," and that they had now processed the transactions of "most of" our partners. "We acknowledge that for some this has taken longer than it should have and continue to work urgently to finalise the rest of the transactions...."

In the company's August results, CFO David Goulden said there were "lower than expected" IT expenses in the second quarter of this year, in part due to phasing IT spend into the third quarter, but did not outline what this IT expense included.
Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,9272) for sharing the article.