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Meta Platform to pay $725m to settle Cambridge Analytica scandal

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running lawsuit that claimed Facebook illegally shared user data with the research firm Cambridge Analytica

It’s “the largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action,” the plaintiffs said in a court filing late Thursday.

The settlement brings Meta a step closer to resolving the 2018 suit brought by Facebook users after it was revealed that the UK research firm connected to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president gained access to the data of as many as 87 million of the social media network’s subscribers. The agreement requires the approval of a federal judge overseeing the suit.

Lawyers for the consumers had steadily gained leverage to pry into the company’s internal records to back up their claims that Facebook failed to safeguard their personal data. Facebook’s parent company could have been on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars more had it gone to trial and lost the case.

Time to settle 

“We pursued a settlement as it’s in the best interest of our community and shareholders,” Meta said in an emailed statement. “Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program. We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust with privacy at the forefront.”

Since the case was filed, Facebook has stopped allowing third parties to access data about users through their friends, plaintiffs said in a court filing detailing the settlement. The company has also strengthened its ability to restrict and monitor how third parties acquire and use Facebook users’ information, and improved its methods for telling users what information Facebook collects and shares about them, according to the filing.

Last month, Google agreed to pay a total of $391.5 million to 40 US states to resolve a probe into controversial location-tracking practices in what state officials called the largest such privacy settlement in US history. Separately, a judge last month approved a $90 million Meta deal to settle a suit over the use of browser cookies and Facebook’s “Like” button to track user activity.

Meta said in an August court filing that it had agreed to settle the Cambridge Analytica suit, but no terms were revealed at the time. A filing a month earlier showed Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg would have to sit for as long as six hours of questioning by plaintiffs’ lawyers. The same filing indicated former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg would have to testify as well.Facebook had argued it disclosed its practices in user agreements. It had also said that anyone sharing their information on a social network shouldn’t count on holding onto their privacy.

SOURCE: News 24

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BusinessEconomyMobile Telecommunications Network (MTN)South AfricaTechnology

MTN GlobalConnect lands 2Africa undersea cable in South Africa

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

The world’s longest undersea cable, 2Africa, has made landfall at Yzerfontein and is linked to its cable landing station at Duynefontein near Cape Town.

MTN GlobalConnect officially announced the landing on Tuesday. It brought the cable to shore last week.

2Africa is owned by a consortium of companies, including MTN GlobalConnect. The other members are China Mobile International, Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook), Orange, Center3 (formerly STC), Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, and WIOCC.

When completed, the cable will stretch 45,000km. It circumnavigates the African continent, connecting it to Europe and Asia.

In addition to being the world’s longest cable, 2Africa will also have the highest design capacity of subsea cables currently serving the continent at 180Tbps. It will be 36Tbps faster than Google’s massive Equiano cable, which itself was over seven times larger than other cables connecting South Africa to Europe and Asia.

When the 2Africa Consortium first announced the cable in 2020, it said the total length would be 37,000km with 21 landing stations in 16 countries in Africa.

In September 2021, the consortium announced the 2Africa PEARLS branch extending to the Arabian Gulf, India, and Pakistan — bringing the length of the system to over 45,000km.

With the extensions, the cable will now serve 33 markets and have at least 47 landing stations. Of these, MTN GlobalConnect will be handling six carrier landing stations — two in South Africa and one each in Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sudan.

Given the glut of subsea cable capacity now landing in South Africa, MyBroadband asked MTN GlobalConnect Chief Fiberco Officer Mohammed Aliyu whether all the additional capacity is needed.

“2Africa is the first cable going around Africa. You’ve got cables on the East and West [coasts], but this is the first time you’ve got a cable that is designed to serve the whole of Africa,” Aliyu said.

“This will be able to support Africa and connect it to Asia — India, Pakistan — as well as connect it to Europe and the rest of the world.”

Aliyu believes this is the most important thing about the 2Africa cable. “Data growth in Africa has been exploding, even before the pandemic. That’s why you’re seeing all the hyperscalers coming in,” he said.

“[Building 2Africa] is not about bringing in excess capacity. It’s much needed. It’s not ‘too much for Africa’, if I can put it that way.”

Alcatel Submarine Networks was appointed to build 2Africa and its extensions using a new technology called Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM).

One benefit of SDM is that it allows 2Africa to support up to 16 fibre pairs, whereas older technologies used in existing African cables supported a maximum of eight. “SDM is a more cost-efficient technology,” Aliyu said.

“With SDM we can also offer both a fibre pair that’s spectrum sharing or full independent fibre with reasonable capacity, compared to what traditional pipes would usually have.”

In addition to greater cost-efficiency and higher capacity, Aliyu said 2Africa’s design also lets it lie 50% deeper than other cables, making it more resilient. Asked how many wavelengths per fibre, and how much capacity per wavelength will be available, MTN GlobalConnect said it could not comment at this stage as it is still busy with its configuration.

MTN GlobalConnect CEO Frédéric Schepens said they expect to light several terabits per second of capacity within the first year of operation. “I can’t give you an exact number at the moment,” Schepens said. “It depends on the customer demand. What I can tell you is we presold quite a lot of capacity already.”

Regarding the scale of their investment, Schepens said that MTN GlobalConnect is investing $500 million (R8.8 billion) over the next three years, starting in 2022, as part of its Ambition 2025 project. “Our investment is one of the largest contributions in developing digital infrastructure on the continent,” stated Schepens.

“Our accelerated investments in digital infrastructure in Africa will be critical for the growth of African economies and the livelihoods of the people in the years to come.”

SOURCE: My broadband

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BusinessGlobal NewsInformation TechnologySpotlightTechnology

Major Meta platform executive quits job at social media giant

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

A Meta Platforms Inc. executive who was instrumental in the acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus said he is leaving the social media giant.

Amin Zoufonoun, the company’s vice president of corporate development, will be taking a break after almost 12 years, he said today in a post on Meta’s Facebook.

“Strategic technology deal work is pretty intense,” he said.

The acquisition strategy helped propel Meta to its current dominance in social media.

ALSO READ: Netflix to begin charging customers who share password in 2023

It has also attracted intense antitrust scrutiny especially around the deals for photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp, which the US Federal Trade Commission is seeking to unwind.

Pressure from regulators in recent years is making it more difficult for Meta to pursue those kinds of deals.

Source: My Broadband

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Global NewsSpotlightTechnology

Mark Zuckerberg speaks on content moderation mistakes, explains company’s policy issues

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder sought to explain some of the company’s more complicated policy issues this week during an interview with podcast host and martial arts commentator Joe Rogan. 

During the podcast, which lasted nearly three hours, Zuckerberg spoke about the “trade offs” that come with trying to moderate a platform with billions of users, pages and posts. 

It’s not a responsibility Zuckerberg said he enjoys or set out to undertake, as chief executive officer of  Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The company tries to balance taking down as much bad content as possible while realizing that the more aggressive they are the more likely it means they will remove something by mistake, he said.

Those mistakes “suck”, Zuckerberg admitted. “It sucks, though I think in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent sucks,” he added. 

Rogan asked Zuckerberg about Facebook’s handling of a potentially damaging news story about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, just before the 2020 election. Facebook cut the article’s distribution by tweaking its algorithms, Zuckerberg said. The company did so because of warnings it had received from the FBI about Russian propaganda. The FBI told Facebook, “you should be on high alert” for a data dump from Russia, Zuckerberg said. “Depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn’t censor enough or censored it way too much,” he said. 

Zuckerberg went on Rogan’s podcast to help promote the metaverse, his vision for the future of the internet that includes a series of virtual worlds where people will work and play as digital avatars. Zuckerberg also spoke about Meta’s plans for augmented reality glasses, which he expects will eventually be a major way to interact with the metaverse. Last year Meta launched a pair of “smart glasses” with Ray-Ban, but those don’t yet have augmented reality technology. 

Settlement

Meta Platforms Inc. settled a long-running lawsuit that claimed Facebook illegally shared user data with the research firm Cambridge Analytica.

The preliminary settlement, disclosed in a court filing late Friday, follows the revelation last month that Zuckerberg would have to sit for as long as six hours of questioning by plaintiffs’ lawyers. Terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.

Facebook users sued the company in 2018 after it was revealed that the UK research firm connected to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president gained access to the data of as many as 87 million of the social media network’s subscribers.

ALSO READ: Facebook experiences strange bug on news feed which sends spamming posts on celebrity pages.

In hard-fought battles over pretrial information sharing, lawyers for the consumers have steadily gained leverage to pry into the company’s internal records to back up their claims that Facebook failed to safeguard their personal data. Facebook’s parent company could’ve been on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars had it lost the case.

The court filing last month also showed COO Sheryl Sandberg would have to testify. The depositions were scheduled to take place through September 20. 

In Friday’s filing lawyers for both sides asked the judge handling the lawsuit to pause it, to “facilitate the process of finalising a written settlement agreement” and presenting it to the court for preliminary approval.

Meta declined to comment on the settlement.

Facebook had argued it disclosed its practices in user agreements. It had also said that anyone sharing their information on a social network shouldn’t count on holding onto their privacy.

Source: News 24

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Global NewsSpotlightTelecommunicationsTrending Today

WhatsApp to make changes on privacy features

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

Meta Platforms-owned WhatsApp is rolling out several privacy features, including the ability to send messages while appearing offline and blocking screenshots of view-once messages.

The messaging platform will also allow users to leave group chats privately without sending a notification to everyone when exiting groups.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wants to keep messages as secure as in-person conversations.

“We’ll keep building new ways to protect your messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations,” he said in a Facebook post.

WhatsApp users can already block their “last seen” status for their contacts, including specific people. 

The messaging platform is now rolling out a similar feature for users’ online presence, with the ability to block their online status from everyone or to mimic their “last seen” settings.

Notably, the system is reciprocal. If a user hides information from a specific contact, WhatsApp will hide their information in return.

WhatsApp users have been able to set messages to expire or viewed once before “self-destructing” for some time now.

However, the platform previously lacked screenshot d previously lacked screenshot detection meaning others could capture such messages before they disappeared.

It is now rolling out a feature that will let users prevent screenshots of their view-once messages.

WhatsApp also previously sent a message to all participants notifying them if someone left the group chat.

It is now rolling out an update that will drop the mass notification sent to group participants and instead inform only group admins when someone leaves a group.

According to WABetaInfo, the changes are rolling out in the latest Android and iOS betas.

Source: My Broadband

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BusinessSpotlightTechnologyTelecommunicationsTrending Today

Facebook and Instagram competes with TikTok, pushes more content.

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to more than double the amount of recommended content pushed to Facebook and Instagram users by the end of 2023.

According to Zuckerberg, recommended content currently makes up around 15% of the posts on Facebook, with the percentage being higher on Instagram.

The change will see Meta’s social media platforms move away from focusing on showing posts from friends lists to recommending all publicly shared content on the services.

“AI finds additional content that people find interesting, that increases engagement and the quality of our feeds,” Zuckerberg said during Meta’s Q2 earning call.

According to a report from The Verge, the move is intended to help Meta compete with TikTok, which leverages AI to recommend videos regardless of their origin.

However, Zuckerberg said Meta’s change will be unique as it won’t only push video content but also publicly shared links and photos.

“In that sense, I think what we’re doing is going to be pretty unique,” he said.

“I don’t think people are going to want to be constrained to one format.”

Source: My Broadband

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AmazonBusinessGlobal NewsSpotlightTrending Today

Apple’s stock plunges with $2trn market valuation on shaky ground

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

Tech giant Apple’s run as a $3 trillion stock which proved fleeting with its grip on a $2 trillion market value is looking wobbly, too.

After briefly surpassing $3 trillion in January, the iPhone maker has lost more than $800 billion in capitalization as tech stocks plunged. With concern growing that the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases could tip the US into recession, the $2 trillion milestone is looking precarious. Apple closed Tuesday at $2.15 trillion.

“In the same way that Apple benefited from the Fed-fuelled bull market, it will suffer as the low interest rate and quantitative easing subsidies fade,” said David Trainer, chief executive officer at investment research firm New Constructs.

Economists predict the Fed will raise interest rates Wednesday by at least half a percentage point, with some predicting a 0.75-point increase in the wake of Friday’s stronger-than-expected inflation data. Further increases are expected this year. All of that could deepen the selloff in tech stocks, which are particularly vulnerable to higher interest rates as they weigh on the current valuation of companies’ future profits.

The FAANG cohort — Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc, Apple, Amazon.com Inc, Netflix Inc and Google parent Alphabet Inc — were poster children of the two-year bull market, rallying at breakneck speed to scale historic valuations. That quickly evaporated this year with the group losing a combined $2.6 trillion in market value as investors fled from growth names for safer assets. Amazon is also close to falling below $1 trillion.

Analysts have grown cautious, too. Over the past three months, they’ve cut their estimates for Apple’s fiscal third-quarter earnings by 7.8%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue projections are down about 4.2% over the same period. The stock also has the lowest share of analyst buy ratings in more than a year.

ALSO READ: Apple upgrades its software, developers hunt for headset hints

KeyBanc Capital Markets sees signs of softer US demand, citing credit card data spending. Others have raised concerns about the pace of revenue growth at the company’s App Store, with Morgan Stanley adding that this poses risks to its estimates for Apple’s Services business. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, Apple derived 18.7% of its fiscal 2021 revenue and more than 30% of gross profit from services.

Apple’s stock woes have intensified this year with a 25% slump and Saudi Aramco snatching its title as the world’s most valuable company. Setting aside the headwinds that have broadly pressured tech stocks — rising interest rates, slowing economic growth and soaring inflation — the tech giant is also facing supply constraints related to Covid restrictions in China. In April, it warned that it could take a $4 billion to $8 billion hit to revenues for the current quarter.

History shows that it can take years for technology stocks to climb back to the highs set in raging bull markets, assuming they ever do. Cisco Systems Inc, a star of the late 1990s tech frenzy, is still 46% below its all-time peak of March 2000.

“I would say that if an investor under-owns these names, then this is an opportunity to add to positions,” said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott, which has about $130 billion in assets. “However, there are always names that lead in some eras, but then it takes years for them to them to regain their record levels. Just because they will continue to grow, that doesn’t mean these names will regain their former leadership.

The stock market rout has pushed the Nasdaq 100 Index’s valuation down to 19 times earnings, the lowest level since the pandemic-induced selloffs of March 2020. The tech-heavy index’s price-earnings ratio had scaled a multiyear high of 31 times in September 2020 as stock markets rallied amid low interest rates and booming demand for tech gear because of pandemic lockdowns.

© 2022 Bloomberg

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Global NewsSpotlightTechnology

Meta Platforms’ COO Sheryl Sandberg steps down

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

Meta platforms’ COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in a Facebook post on Wednesday that she is leaving the company. She worked closely with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for 14 years powering the growth of what has turned out to be the world’s biggest social network.

The announcement caused a ruckus sending the social media company’s shares down by 4%, the stock became nearly flat in after hours trade.

According to Sheryl, When she took the job in 2008, she hoped she would be in this role for five years, “but Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life,” she said.

“Sheryl will be succeeded by Chief Growth Officer Javier Olivan” , Zuckerberg said in a separate Facebook post. Zuckerberg went further to state that he no plans to replace Sandberg’s role directly within the company’s existing structure.

“I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated, rather than having all the business and operations functions organized separately from our products,” he said.

Olivan has worked at Meta for more than 14 years and has led teams handling Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Sandberg’s departure marks an end of an era for Meta, which is shifting focus toward hardware products and the “metaverse” after years of scandals over privacy abuses and the spread of conspiratorial content on its platforms, as well as plateauing user growth on its flagship app Facebook.

The second-in-command to founder Zuckerberg, who was 23 years old when he hired her, Sandberg is one of the most visible executives at the company and the lead architect of its often-criticized ads-based business model.

Bringing management experience and knowledge of the then-nascent digital ads industry, she transformed Facebook from a buzzy startup into a revenue behemoth, while also positioning herself as the face of feminism in corporate America.

At the time, Facebook was making $272 million in revenue, for a net loss of $56 million, according to regulatory filings. By 2011, a year before the company’s initial public offering, its revenue had shot to $3.7 billion on $1 billion in profits.

Meta ended 2021 with revenue of $118 billion and earnings of $39.4 billion.

When asked about her next steps, she told Reuters she was focusing on philanthropy at a “critical moment for women.”

Sandberg also said in her post that she will continue to serve on Meta’s board after leaving the company in the fall.

“We’ve hired so many great leaders, I feel really good about that. The next leadership team is in place to take the company forward,” she said, mentioning Chief Business Officer Marne Levine and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg by name.

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AfricaInformation & TechnologyPress OfficeSpotlight

TikTok plans big push into gaming

by Radarr Africa
written by Radarr Africa

TikTok has been conducting tests so users can play games on its video-sharing app in Vietnam, part of plans for a major push into gaming, four people familiar with the matter said.

Featuring games on its platform would boost advertising revenue as well as the amount of time users spend on the app – one of the world’s most popular with more than 1 billion monthly active users.

Boasting a tech-savvy population with 70% of its citizens under the age of 35, Vietnam is an attractive market for social media platforms such as TikTok, Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s YouTube and Google.

TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, plans to roll out gaming more widely in Southeast Asia, the people said. That move could come as early as the third quarter, said two of them.

The sources declined to be identified as the information has yet to be publicly disclosed.

A TikTok representative said the company has tested bringing HTML5 games, a common form of minigame, to its app through tie-ups with third-party game developers and studios such as Zynga Inc, but declined to comment on its plans for Vietnam or its broader gaming ambitions.

“We’re always looking at ways to enrich our platform and regularly test new features and integrations that bring value to our community,” the representative said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.

Reuters was not able to learn TikTok’s plans for rolling out gaming features in other markets. Although TikTok users can watch games being streamed, in most regions they are not able to play games within the TikTok app. In the United States, only a couple of games appear to be available.

Source: Fin 24

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