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Glory

Pretty, Baby, Machine

Celebrity life can be a rollercoaster ride, with fame and fortune often serving as fleeting companions. It becomes even more complicated when one

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Evil

25 Celebrities Who Fell From Glory… And Handled It Pretty Badly

wealthofgeeks

Boss

BIvck Entertainment continues to strengthen its roster of talents with Jayson Luzadas or popularly known as Boss Toyo joining on

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Online star Boss Toyo goes mainstream

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manilastandard

Georgia Institute of Technology

Social media

WPSD-TV

"Just because social media platforms state you must be 13 years of age or older to use it, doesn't mean that, at 13, go ahead and give your kids all

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What the Tech: Social media and kids

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WPSD Local 6

Missing People

A legitimate post regarding a missing person will be issued by a reliable source such as law enforcement or the news media.

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Beware of sharing Facebook posts on missing people or pets

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WSB Radio

Opinion

Teens will keep using YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and other apps if parents use scare tactics instead of acceptance. We’re having the wrong conversation around teen social media use, writes Ana Homayoun.

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Outline of thought

Opinion: We’re thinking about teens and social media all wrong

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CNN on MSN.com

U.S. Surgeon General: Social media presents "profound risk" for kids

You may have managed to go all this time without ever making any kind of social media account. However, Facebook could potentially still have your information even if you've never set up an account. Find out why this is possible and how you can protect ...

How Facebook secretly collects your information even if you haven't signed up

Yahoo News

Potential

Sky High

By recent projections outlined by Oberlo, the social media commerce market is expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2026. If you want to grow your e-commerce business using social media, it may be important to show off your products from new angles and ...

Take Your Social Media Earning Potential Sky-High With This $79.97 Quadcopter

Entrepreneur

WWE Superstars

Detailing the numbers of 10 WWE Superstars social media followings, including where they do and don't excel away from the ring.

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Most Followed WWE Superstars On Social Media (2023)

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Wrestling News

Spread the loveAs a social media platform, Facebook has become an integral part of our daily lives. It’s a place where we interact with friends, family, and acquaintances, and where we share our thoughts,

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How to See Who Shared Your Post on Facebook

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thetechedvocate.org

Facebook, Inc. operates a social networking website. The Company website allows people to communicate with their family, friends, and coworkers. Facebook develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information, photographs, website links, and videos. Facebook users have the ability to share and restrict information based on their own specific criteria.

The Facebook company is now Meta. Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. We want to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. To do that, we ask that you help create a safe and respectful online space. These community values encourage constructive conversations on this page: • Start with an open mind. Whether you agree or disagree, engage with empathy. • Comments violating our Community Standards will be removed or hidden. So please treat everybody with respect. • Keep it constructive. Use your interactions here to learn about and grow your understanding of others. • Our moderators are here to uphold these guidelines for the benefit of everyone, every day. • If you are seeking support for issues related to your Facebook account, please reference our Help Center (https://www.facebook.com/help) or Help Community (https://www.facebook.com/help/community). For a full listing of our jobs, visit http://www.facebookcareers.com

Facebook

This article is copublished with The Verge. Read on our collaborator's site Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. The , sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts. data The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner, Meta. See our data here. GitHub Each year, the Internal Revenue Service processes individual returns filed electronically, and some of the most widely used e-filing services employ the pixel, The Markup found. about 150 million When users sign up to file their taxes with the popular service TaxAct, for example, they’re asked to provide personal information to calculate their returns, including how much money they make and their investments. A pixel on TaxAct’s website then sent some of that data to Facebook, including users’ filing status, their adjusted gross income, and the amount of their refund, according to a review by The Markup. Income was rounded to the nearest thousand and refund to the nearest hundred. The pixel also sent the names of dependents in an obfuscated, , format. but generally reversible TaxAct, which about three million “consumer and professional users,” also uses Google’s analytics tool on its website, and The Markup found similar financial data, but not names, being sent to Google through its tool. says it has TaxAct wasn’t the only tax filing service using the Meta Pixel. Tax preparation giant H&R Block, which also offers an online filing option that , embedded a pixel on its site that gathered information on filers’ health savings account usage and dependents’ college tuition grants and expenses. attracts millions of customers per year Impact Citing this investigation, three congressional Democrats for sharing sensitive taxpayer data with Facebook. Feb. 2, 2023: demanded that the Internal Revenue Service investigate tax preparation companies Following this investigation, , Meta, and Google about how users’ sensitive financial information was shared with the tech companies. Dec. 14, 2022: Sen. Elizabeth Warren and colleagues questioned tax filing companies TaxSlayer, another widely used filing service, sent personal information to Facebook as part of the social media company’s “advanced matching” system, which gathers information on web visitors in an attempt to link them to Facebook accounts. The information gathered through the pixel on TaxSlayer’s site included phone numbers, the name of the user filling out the form, and the names of any dependents added to the return. As with TaxAct, specific demographic information about a user was obfuscated but still usable for Facebook to link a user to an existing profile. TaxSlayer it completed 10 million federal and state tax returns last year. has said The Markup also found the pixel code on a tax preparation site operated by a financial advice and software company called Ramsey Solutions, which uses a version of TaxSlayer’s service. That pixel gathered even more personal data from a tax return summary page, including information on income and refund amounts. This information was not sent immediately upon visiting the page but only when visitors clicked dropdown headings to see more details of their report. Even Intuit, the company that runs America’s dominant online filing software, employed the pixel. Intuit’s TurboTax, however, did not send financial information to Meta but rather usernames and the last time a device signed in. In some circumstances, the pixel also gathered information like an order ID number and user’s email address after they signed in. “We take the privacy of our customers’ data very seriously,” Nicole Coburn, a spokesperson for TaxAct, said in an email. “TaxAct, at all times, endeavors to comply with all IRS regulations.” Angela Davied, a spokesperson for H&R Block, said the company “regularly evaluate[s] our practices as part of our ongoing commitment to privacy, and will review the information.” Megan McConnell, a spokesperson for Ramsey Solutions, said in an email that the company “implemented the Meta Pixel to deliver a more personalized customer experience.” “We did NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being collected by Facebook from the Pixel,” the statement said. “As soon as we found out, we immediately informed TaxSlayer to deactivate the Pixel from Ramsey SmartTax.” After The Markup contacted TaxSlayer, spokesperson Molly Richardson said in an email that the company had removed the pixel to evaluate its use. “Our customers’ privacy is of utmost importance, and we take concerns about our customers’ information very seriously,” she said, adding that Ramsey Solutions “decided to remove the pixel” as well. Rick Heineman, a spokesperson for Intuit, said the company’s pixel “does not track, gather, or share information that users enter in TurboTax while filing their taxes,” although Intuit “may share some non-tax-return information, such as username, with marketing partners to deliver a better customer experience,” like not showing Intuit ads on Facebook to people who have accounts already. The company said it’s in compliance with regulations but has modified the pixel to no longer send usernames. Mandi Matlock, a Harvard Law School lecturer focused on tax law, said The Markup’s findings showed taxpayers “providing some of the most sensitive information that they own, and it’s being exploited.” “This is appalling,” she said. “It truly is.” On Monday, after TaxAct was contacted by The Markup for comment, the company’s site no longer sent financial details like income and refund amount to Meta but continued to send the names of dependents. The site also continued to send financial information to Google Analytics. Also as of Monday, TaxSlayer and Ramsey Solutions had removed the pixel from their tax filing sites and TurboTax had stopped sending usernames through the pixel at sign in. H&R Block’s site was continuing to send information on health savings accounts and college tuition grants. As of Wednesday, after this story was published, TaxAct had removed the pixel from its tax filing web application but was still sending financial information to Google Analytics, and H&R Block told The Markup it removed the pixel from its tax filing website “to stop any client tax information from being collected.” The Markup verified that it had been removed. How the Meta Pixel Tracks Users Meta makes the pixel code freely available to anyone who wants it, allowing businesses to embed the code on their sites as they wish. Using the code helps both Facebook and the businesses. When a customer comes to a business’s website, the pixel might record what items the customer browsed, say, a T-shirt, for example. The business can then target its ads on Facebook to people who looked at that shirt, allowing the business to find an audience that may already be interested in its products. Meta wins financially too. it can use the data it gleans from tools like the pixel to power its algorithms, providing it insight into the habits of users across the internet. The company says The strategy has been successful for Facebook. In 2018, that there were more than two million pixels across the web—a massive data-harvesting operation most internet users never see. the company told Congress “The practice is ubiquitous,” said Jon Callas, director of public interest technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who said he was left in “shock but not surprise” at The Markup’s findings. Some of the sensitive data collection analyzed by The Markup appears linked to default behaviors of the Meta Pixel, while some appears to arise from customizations made by the tax filing services, someone acting on their behalf, or other software installed on the site. For example, Meta Pixel collected health savings account and college expense information from H&R Block’s site because the information appeared in webpage titles and the standard configuration of the Meta Pixel automatically collects the title of a page the user is viewing, along with the web address of the page and other data. It was able to collect income information from Ramsey Solutions because the information appeared in a summary that expanded when clicked. The summary was detected by the pixel as a button, and in its default configuration the pixel collects text from inside a clicked button. The pixels embedded by TaxSlayer and TaxAct used a feature called “ .” automatic advanced matching That feature scans forms looking for fields it thinks contain like a phone number, first name, last name, or email address, then sends detected information to Meta. personally identifiable information On TaxSlayer’s site this feature collected phone numbers and the names of filers and their dependents. On TaxAct it collected the names of dependents. The data collected by the matching feature is sent in an obfuscated form known as a hash, which Meta states is used in order to “ .” help protect user privacy But the company can generally determine the pre-obfuscated version of the data—in fact Meta the hashed information to link other pixel data to Facebook and Instagram profiles. explicitly uses This pixel feature was turned off by default when The Markup set up a test pixel attached to a business account but could be turned on by clicking a toggle during setup. When TaxAct sent dollar amounts like adjusted gross income to Meta, they were transmitted as to a “ ,” which are sent only if the pixel is configured beyond the default by a website operator or another application the website operator adds to their site. parameters custom event TaxAct did not respond to questions about whether and why it configured the pixel in this manner. Once a tax return was filled out on taxact.com, information including an individual’s adjusted gross income, federal refund amount, and number of dependents was sent to Meta via the Meta Pixel. Data in the screenshots is not real user data. Source: taxact.com and The Markup There are limits to the types of data Meta says it will collect through the pixel. The company says it doesn’t want sensitive information sent to it, including financial data, and that it uses automated filtering to block potentially sensitive data. states that it prohibits sending information including bank account or credit card numbers or “information about an individual’s financial account or status.” Its help center Still, one specific type of prohibited data, income, was exactly what two tax sites sent to Facebook, The Markup found. Data sent to Facebook by TaxAct suggests it was also previously sending a parameter labeled “student_loan_interest,” which is now being filtered by the pixel before being sent. From January to July of this year, The Markup tracked websites’ use of the pixel as part of , a partnership with . For the project, participating users installed a browser extension that provided The Markup with a copy of all data shared with Meta via the pixel. the Pixel Hunt Mozilla Rally The Markup initially discovered sensitive information was shared by the tax preparers through data shared by Pixel Hunt participants. The Markup then signed up for accounts on the companies’ web applications and used the “Network” section of , a tool built into Google’s Chrome browser, to replicate and confirm the data. Chrome DevTools Earlier this year, with the help of Pixel Hunt participants, The Markup found sensitive data sent to Facebook on , , and the . the Education Department’s federal student aid application website crisis pregnancy websites websites of prominent hospitals Meta collects so much data even the company itself sometimes may be unaware of where it ends up. Earlier this year on a leaked Facebook document written by Facebook privacy engineers who said the company did not “have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data,” making it difficult to promise it wouldn’t use certain data for certain purposes. Vice reported At the time, a company spokesperson told Vice that Facebook has “extensive processes and controls to manage data and comply with privacy regulations.” In response to The Markup’s questions about the tax websites’ use of the pixel, Dale Hogan, a spokesperson for Meta, pointed to the company’s rules on sensitive financial information. “Advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools,” Hogan wrote in an emailed statement. “Doing so is against our policies and we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.” Google spokesperson Jackie Berté said in an email that the company “has strict policies against advertising to people based on sensitive information” and that Google Analytics data “is obfuscated, meaning it is not tied back to an individual and our policies prohibit customers from sending us data that could be used to identify a user.” The IRS Closely Regulates Tax Data Nina Olson, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights, was the national taxpayer advocate at the Internal Revenue Service between 2001 and 2019, a position in the agency meant to represent the interests of taxpayers. As part of her role at the IRS, she said, she contributed to the development of that govern disclosures of tax information. Olson said the IRS regulations controlling the way private tax filing services can use data are intentionally “very strong.” regulations Under the regulations she helped develop, tax preparers—including e-filing companies—can use the information they receive from taxpayers only for limited purposes; for anything beyond immediately facilitating filing, the preparer has to get signed consent from the user that explains the recipient and the precise information being disclosed. The government goes so far as to prescribe of requests for disclosure, saying it must be “the same size as, or larger than, the normal or standard body text used by the website or software package.” even the font size The penalties for disclosing data without consent are potentially steep: Fines and even jail time are possible, although Olson said she wasn’t aware of any criminal cases that have been pursued. The Markup reviewed the tax preparation websites for disclosures that specifically mentioned Meta or Facebook but did not find them. Instead, some companies included relatively broad disclosure agreements. Do they have a list saying they’re going to disclose the refund amounts, and your children, and your whatever ? to Facebook Nina Olson, Center for taxpayer rights TaxAct, for example, requested users approve sending their tax information to its sister company, TaxSmart Research LLC, so it could “develop, offer, and provide products and services” for users. It also stated “TaxSmart Research LLC may use service providers and business partners to accomplish these tasks.” H&R Block, meanwhile, included nearly the same disclosure request so “H&R Block Personalized Services, LLC” could provide products of its own. Those sites provided the user with the option to decline to share tax information, although data was shared with Facebook regardless of what option users chose, according to The Markup’s tests. Any disclosure from a tax preparer must provide the exact purpose and recipient to be in compliance, Olson said. “Do they have a list saying they’re going to disclose the refund amounts, and your children, and your whatever ?” she said. If not, she said, they may be in violation of regulations. to Facebook The IRS declined to comment or answer questions about whether any of the sites sharing tax information were in violation of tax law. No Way Out for Taxpayers American taxpayers have few options but to turn to private companies to file their returns. Unlike other countries, the United States has a for filing taxes, one that often requires the use of third-party tax preparers. heavily privatized system While in those other countries the government , after from private companies, tax preparers in the U.S. effectively act as middlemen between taxpayers and the government. handles the calculations, and taxpayers simply approve the numbers a successful lobbying push Tax preparation is now big business: that it’s a more than $11 billion industry in the United States. Market researchers have estimated A free preparation and filing option exists, but it’s limited to people making $73,000 or less and can be difficult to use. Companies offer their tax software at no charge through an agreement with the IRS but for not making the option easily available. have been criticized The IRS even effectively directs taxpayers attempting to file for free to some of the companies The Markup found using the pixel. A are part of the agreement, known as the Free File Alliance—including TaxAct and TaxSlayer. have been part of the program in the past. handful of tax preparation services TurboTax and H&R Block Harvard’s Matlock said The Markup’s findings showed the almost inevitable consequences of relying on for-profit companies to handle a government requirement. It’s a process that provides users little choice but to hand over their data to Facebook if they want to comply with the law, she said. “It’s frustrating because taxpayers have been pushed into the arms of these private, for-profit companies simply to comply with their tax filing obligations,” she said. “We have no choice, really, in the matter.” Update Nov. 23, 2022: This story has been updated to note when individual filing services stopped sharing customer tax data through the Meta Pixel. Correction Nov. 28, 2022: An earlier version of this story said no information was gathered by TurboTax past the sign-in page. In some circumstances, email addresses and order ID numbers were gathered. By , , and Simon Fondrie-Teitler Angie Waller Colin Lecher Also published here Photo by on Alex Haney Unsplash

Facebook Has Been Receiving Your Financial Information From Tax Filing Websites

This article is copublished with STAT. Read on our collaborator's site Meta is facing mounting questions about its access to sensitive medical data that found the company’s pixel tracking tool collecting details about patients’ doctor’s appointments, prescriptions, and health conditions on hospital websites. following a Markup investigation During a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee , Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) requested that Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—provide a “comprehensive and precise” accounting of the medical information it keeps on users. hearing on Wednesday “There’s been substantial public reporting, controversy, and concern about the Meta Pixel product and the possibility that its deployment on various hospital systems’ websites, for example, has enabled Meta to collect private health care data,” Ossoff said. “We need to understand, as the U.S. Congress, whether or not Meta is collecting, has collected, has access to, or is storing, medical or health data for U.S. persons,” he added. In response to Ossoff’s question about whether Meta has medical or health care data about its users, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox responded, “Not to my knowledge.” Cox also promised to follow up with a written response to the committee. In June, The Markup that Meta Pixels on the websites of 33 of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America were transmitting the details of patients’ doctor’s appointments to Meta when patients booked on the websites. reported We also found Meta Pixels inside the password-protected patient portals of seven health systems collecting data about patients’ prescriptions, sexual orientation, and health conditions. Former regulators told The Markup that the hospitals’ use of the pixel may have violated the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) prohibitions against sharing protected health information. “Advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools,” Meta spokesperson Dale Hogan wrote to The Markup in an emailed statement. “Doing so is against our policies and we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.” Since The Markup’s Investigation: As of Sept. 15, 28 of the 33 hospitals have removed the Meta Pixel from their doctor booking pages or blocked it from sending patient information to Facebook. At least six of the seven health systems had also removed the pixels from their patient portals. The Markup reached out to the institutions who removed the pixel from their websites after our investigation published in June. As of press time, three institutions—Sanford Health, El Camino Health, and Henry Ford Health—had responded. Read their statements . here One health system, North Carolina–based Novant Health, mailed data breach notifications to following The Markup’s report. In the breach notification, Novant Health stated the pixel was added as part of a promotional campaign to encourage use of Novant’s MyChart patient portal, but “the pixel was configured incorrectly and may have allowed certain private information to be transmitted to Meta.” On Sept. 16, Novant amended its data breach notification post to state that Meta informed the provider that it “generally” filtered out patients’ sensitive medical information and that it did “not have information to return or destroy.” 1.3 million customers The North Carolina attorney general’s office the hospitals’ data sharing after calls from state lawmakers for a probe. stated it was “actively investigating” At least five class action lawsuits have been filed against Meta contending that the pixel’s data collection on hospital websites broke various state and federal laws. One, on behalf of a Baltimore-based MedStar Health System patient, claims that Meta Pixels collected patient information from at least 664 different hospitals’ websites. The other lawsuits were brought on behalf of patients of and hospitals in , , and . filed against the company Novant Health San Francisco Los Angeles Chicago “We Do Not Have an Adequate Level of Control” Meanwhile, developments in another legal case suggest Meta may have a hard time providing the Senate committee with a complete account of the sensitive health data it holds on users. In March, two Meta employees testifying in a case about the Cambridge Analytica scandal told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that it would be very difficult for the company to track down all the data associated with a single user account. “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the—where the data flows,” one Facebook engineer said, according to the , which was first reported by . “I would be surprised if there’s even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively.” transcript The Intercept The engineers’ comments echo the same worries expressed in a 2021 privacy memo written by Facebook engineers that was . leaked to Vice “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’ ” the memo’s authors wrote. . This article was copublished with STAT, a national publication that delivers trusted and authoritative journalism about health, medicine, and the life sciences. Sign up for its health tech newsletter, delivered Tuesday and Thursday mornings, here: https://www.statnews.com/signup/health-tech/ Credits: and Todd Feathers Simon Fondrie-Teitler First published here Photo by on Colin Lloyd Unsplash

Hospitals Remove Facebook Tracker but Questions Still Remain

We once quipped that all anyone ever wanted to do over the internet was to . Didn't matter whether that was something you actually wanted or needed or even if it was something useful — as long as you were on the internet, you were a potential customer. sell you stuff And nothing proves that point more than an by this past week to begin charging users for a so-called subscription bundle. Yes, Papa Zuck wants to ride the by asking users to pay at least $11.99 per month to receive the coveted (?) verified badge on and that indicates you are who you say you are and not somebody . announcement Meta subscription-as-a-service train Facebook Instagram pretending to be George W. Bush $11.99 also gets you a slew of other benefits, including "help when you need it" with "access to a real person for common account issues," which presumably means that non-paying users will be relegated to a merry-go-round of automated messages that leaves them more confused than ever. So why now? Well, 2022 really wasn't kind to Meta or its founder Mark Zuckerberg, with both in their worth because of an insistence on a technology (aka the "metaverse") that is yet to gain widespread appeal. Despite laying off (with more expected in the ), Meta — which owns , , and (among others) — is on the hook for improving profitability and sales after it burned through billions in getting people to give a damn about VR (and by extension the metaverse) with nothing to show for it. losing billions 11,000 employees near future Facebook Whatsapp Instagram Whether this experiment — which will initially be rolled out in Australia and New Zealand later this week — will bear fruit is yet to be seen. Though the last time a billionaire offered users the ability to purchase the verified check mark on their social media website, it turned out . 🙄 as well as you'd expect Instagram ranked #1 in this week's while Facebook was trending on the #2 spot. Tech Company Rankings 👋 You’re reading HackerNoon's Tech Company News Brief, a weekly collection of tech goodness that combines HackerNoon's proprietary data with internet trends to determine which companies are rising and falling in the public consciousness. Subscribe to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday! here Microsoft Seeks Dominance in AI, But Also Gaming.. 🏌️ 's latest plan to monetize the internet has less to do with selling subscriptions and more with monopolizing its in artificial intelligence (though we wouldn't just yet.) Microsoft new-found relevance rule out subscriptions Ever since ChatGPT was released to the public at large, users have been with what the chatbot can do — prompting Microsoft to bake that technology within its search engine Bing. Well, sadly for the more freaky ones out there, Microsoft has now decided to the number of times users can interact with the Bing chatbot because it simply wasn't capable of and spewed nonsense like wanting to steal nuclear secrets. going nuts limit prolonged conversations In the background, however, Microsoft is already selling the idea of AI-powered Bing to advertisers so that when users ask something like "what are the best hotels in Mexico?", the chatbot could display hotel ads, Reuters . reports Meanwhile, the company is , trying to convince antitrust regulators in the EU to please, please, please let them acquire Activision-Blizzard — the producer of hits such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft — so that the video game industry becomes more "competitive." (lol) hard at work is having none of it and wants regulators to block the deal. Sony Microsoft was trending on the #46 spot this week. Amazon Asks Employees to Return to the Office 🏃 , one of the largest employers in the U.S., an advisory to employees asking that they commute to the office at least three times a week. In a note explaining the decision, the e-commerce giant's CEO, Andy Jassy, said that learning and collaborating were a lot easier when employees worked in person, and teams bonded a lot better when they were face-to-face with each other. Amazon issued More power to Amazon, I guess.. The company was trending on the #38 spot this week. In Other News.. 📰 China's has taken heed of Meta's and decided it wants with VR and the metaverse. Tencent Holdings failures nothing to do Investors are of due to regulatory scrutiny. pulling out Binance in droves Elon Musk's fired some employees that happened to be unionizing at its Buffalo, New York facility. It said its decision by the unionizing efforts. Tesla was not prompted An Indian firm is taking work-life balance seriously, to ensure that employees leave the office after their shifts are over. taking steps And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️ — Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon

Facebook: Now Available at an Introductory Price of $11.99

Facebook: ahora disponible a un precio de lanzamiento de $ 11.99

Facebook : maintenant disponible au prix de lancement de 11,99 $

फेसबुक: अब $11.99 की शुरुआती कीमत पर उपलब्ध है

Facebook: 11.99 ドルのお試し価格で利用できるようになりました

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Facebook：现已推出，促销价 11.99 美元

This is by (source: ). Lichfield is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired. Twitter thread Gideon Lichfield @glichfield 03-21-2021 https://twitter.com/glichfield/status/1370735851882299393?embedable=true&thread=true Feature image generated via prompt of ‘A Deeper Look at Facebook's PR Strategy’ HackerNoon Stable Diffusion

A Deeper Look at Facebook's PR Strategy

As an online entrepreneur, chatGPT can help identify your target audience for Facebook and Google ads campaigns. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to use chatGPT to identify your target audience online. 1. Sign Up and Configure your ChatGPT Settings To use to identify your target audience for Facebook and Google ads campaigns, you must first sign up on the website and configure your ChatGPT settings. This configuration includes things like real-time response, tone, language, and a lot more. ChatGPT 2. Integrate ChatGPT into your Website and Social Media Channels No one can overstate the importance of integrating chatGPT into a website, as business owners have asserted being able to using chatbots. The ability to respond quickly to customers' queries is invaluable, and when you incorporate bots like chatGPT into your website, you do not just allow the bot to learn about your business, but you also give customers a quick response to queries. expand their business deals by 65% By integrating chatGPT into your website, you can help the bot learn more about your business and the interests of your customers. This information is crucial in developing an effective marketing strategy for Google and Facebook. 3. Input Specific Prompts and Queries on how to Identify your Target Audience for your Business Once you've configured chatGPT with your website and Facebook channels, you can ask the bot what is the most efficient way to identify your target audience for Facebook and Google ads campaigns. You'll get a range of answers to your questions, depending on the type of prompts you ask. Once you've gathered these answers, you can create additional prompts in order to narrow and focus them. 4. Edit the Response as much as possible and Repeat the Process Once you have received the responses from chatGPT, you should edit them as much as possible and narrow them down. You can edit the responses by adding details that are more specific to your business, such as your location, the uses of the products you're selling, and more. When you do this, the chatbot generates tailored responses based on the information you provide. For example, if you run a clothing store, you can use chatGPT to research and identify your target audience on Facebook. To do this, ask the bot to identify a specific target audience in a certain location (like "women in Austin who like to go out dancing"). You can narrow down your results by providing additional details about the type of clothing you sell (like "sexy dresses") or the age group of people expected to buy your clothing ("women between 18 and 25"). When you provide relevant information such as these, chatGPT will give you a more detailed result on the target audience for your Facebook and Google ads campaign. You can then use these results to direct your Facebook and Google ads campaign. 5. Generate Content related to your Target Audience's Needs The last thing you need to do if you want to use chatGPT for your Facebook and Google ads campaigns is generate content and ads that focus on your target audience. Creating relevant content through Google and Facebook ads is a marketing no-brainer. After all, report that content marketing generates the necessary leads and demands for their business. Creating relevant content, such as blog posts, social media posts, newsletters, and so on, helps you to convert your target audience into potential customers. over 67% of marketers Benefits of Using ChatGPT for Online Marketing/Campaigns ChatGPT offers a number of benefits for your online business. They include: 1. Fast Real-Time Response One of the biggest benefits of using chatGPT for your social media channels and websites is that you can get fast responses to customer queries. With the bot handling customer queries, you can focus your energy on solving more complicated issues for your customers. 2. Content Curation and Research for your Targeted Audience chatGPT allows you to easily create content that is properly researched and curated for your customer needs. For example, if you run a footwear store, you can easily create blog posts and social media content on why a particular piece of footwear is ideal for a certain activity or season. This content will help to arouse your target audience's interest in what you have to offer and draw them to your website or social media channel. 3. Customer Engagement You can use chatGPT to engage with potential customers on social media. When you post content on Twitter or Facebook, and people respond to your post, you can use chatGPT to reply to those responses under your original post. With enough engagement, you can get your brand name out there and attract potential customers to your website. Conclusion Using chatGPT as a marketing tool requires you to provide the bot with enough relevant information for it to get the specific results you want. The bot can then target audiences on Google and Facebook to generate leads and conversions for your business using different methods. Read through the article to understand how chatGPT helps identify your target audience for Google and Facebook ads campaigns.

How ChatGPT Can Help Identify the Target Audience for Google and Facebook Ad Campaigns

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Mark Zuckerberg Wears "My Mom Thinks I'm Cool" Tshirt & Mesh Shorts in 2005 The Facebook Interview 

This article is copublished with STAT. Read on our collaborator's site The Markup has found that Facebook is serving up ads and posts for the so-called “abortion pill reversal” procedure, a medically unapproved and potentially dangerous process that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says is “not based on science.” Facebook has been circulating this content for years, a practice that both lawmakers and anti-disinformation advocates have publicly criticized. But it’s especially controversial now as interest in medication abortion has spiked with the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and resulting physical clinic closures. We found 17 ads from two anti-abortion activist groups circulated on Facebook from October through March. We collected that data through our project, which gathers posts and group recommendations served to a national of Facebook users. Citizen Browser panel Meta’s own ad library showed another group’s abortion reversal ad was live on the platform in . And regular unpaid Facebook posts pushing the procedure also appeared in our Citizen Browser data as recently as . May June The ads appear to be addressed to people experiencing unwanted pregnancies who have just begun the two-step process of a medication abortion: one dose of mifepristone, which ends the pregnancy by blocking production of the natural hormone progesterone, and one of misoprostol, which induces contractions similar to a miscarriage. They encourage people who have taken the first pill to skip the second half and instead flood their bodies with progesterone, a hormone that promotes fetal growth, in an attempt to halt the process. Many of the posts list a toll-free number and website for that can connect callers with a physician to prescribe the progesterone. a 24/7 help line One website linked from an ad states that this “reversal” can be effective up to 72 hours after someone has taken the first pill and that the treatment has a “64-68% success rate.” It lists mild side effects, including sleepiness and lightheadedness. Medical experts say that there’s no evidence that the procedure works and that its potential side effects can be life-threatening. An by the University of California San Francisco Medical Center noted that the touted success rates come from three reports that were very limited, had no control groups, and lacked oversight by an ethics committee. issue brief “A systematic review of literature on the topic concluded in 2015 that there is no credible evidence that abortion ‘reversal’ improves the chances of continuing pregnancy,” it reads. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that the procedure is “unproven and unethical.” states Aside from efficacy, a of the procedure’s safety at the University of California, Davis, had to be stopped before it was complete because three of the test subjects were hospitalized for severe hemorrhaging, although the reasons are unclear. study All three of the women took only the first half of the two-drug abortion pill regimen and skipped the second; then two took a placebo and one took progesterone. “All we could say was that there’s something from a safety standpoint going on—we don’t know exactly what it is—but it wasn’t safe to continue the study in otherwise healthy subjects,” said Dr. Mitchell Creinin, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UC Davis, who led the study and is an on contraception and medication abortion. expert He added that perhaps a future study may provide more clarity. In the meantime, however, he says that “this treatment is unproven for both efficacy and safety” and that “every leading medical organization has said this is bogus.” In 2019, the American Medical Association in U.S. District Court in North Dakota to block a new state law that would require doctors to tell patients that a medication abortion may be reversed and where to get it done. filed a lawsuit The AMA called it an “experimental and unethical treatment” and “a patently false and unproven claim unsupported by scientific evidence.” The case is ongoing. At the time, North Dakota was one of eight states that had passed similar “compelled speech” laws. In its , the AMA argued that the legislative trend is “unmoored from medical science.” court complaint Meta says in that it prohibits ads that make misleading health claims, as well as ads containing content that’s been debunked by experts on that topic. its advertising policies At the same time, recent suggest that Facebook and Instagram have been removing users’ posts about the distribution and availability of abortion pills themselves—and even banning accounts that create those posts—since the Supreme Court’s ruling last month overturning Roe v. Wade. media reports A Meta spokesperson’s explained that Facebook wasn’t allowing posts involving the sale or gifting of pharmaceuticals; but critics said the company’s policy toward abortion-related content is confusing and unevenly enforced. statement Meta did not reply to multiple emails and direct messages to a spokesperson on Twitter requesting comment. Meta’s policy decisions are particularly relevant now. Because medication abortions only require a prescription and a mailing address, they currently exist in a rapidly changing . legal gray area Reproductive health advocates say this will make it an even more confusing environment for people trying to educate themselves and access health services in a timely way. Medication abortions now account for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., according to . a report this year Citizen Browser panelists saw multiple abortion pill reversal advertisements paid for by two anti-abortion activist organizations: Heartbeat International and Live Action. Andrea Trudden, Heartbeat International’s vice president of communications, told The Markup that abortion pill reversal is indeed safe and effective, and that the organization fields questions about this debate so often that it has a page on its devoted to it. website She claimed in an email that “[t]housands of women have been able to save their pregnancies and give birth to healthy children thanks to abortion pill reversal.” Trudden and others claim that UC Davis’s safety study showed the procedure was effective because in four of the five cases where progesterone was administered after taking the first abortion pill, a fetal heartbeat was detected two weeks later. However, Creinin said that because the study was halted early, there were not enough subjects for a statistical analysis on efficacy. Live Action and the advertiser appearing in Meta’s ad library, RETA Pregnancy Clinic & Family Resources, did not respond to requests for comment from The Markup. The text of one Live Action ad tells the story of “Shashana”: “Pregnant and abandoned by her baby’s father, Shashana took the abortion pill. She immediately regretted it and called Planned Parenthood—but they denied her help. Thankfully, she didn’t give up trying to save her baby and discovered the Abortion Pill Reversal Hotline. With the help of trained doctors, she was able to save her baby boy.” Credit:facebook.com Another Live Action ad has a close-up picture of a fetus and text that reads, “On day one, a baby’s DNA, gender, ethnicity, hair color, and eye color are determined. This is human development in the first 10 weeks of life. Did you know it is possible to reverse the abortion pill?” This ad was targeted toward women Meta had marked as interested in “pregnancy” and “motherhood.” When a Citizen Browser panelist saw it in early March, this ad had already been shared 36,000 times. Facebook has allowed ads on this topic for years. Google used to serve them up as well, but an advocacy group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) said Google removed the ads after the center published last September criticizing both Facebook and Google for targeting the ads to “children between the ages of 13 and 17.” a report In a statement to at the time, Facebook said “most of the ads were inactive or months or years old” and “many” had been removed for violating “our policies around offering adult products and services.” news organizations It did not address whether it would continue serving the ads to adults. According to our Citizen Browser data, the abortion pill reversal ads are not targeting minors on Facebook but rather adults. It is not clear whether these targeting choices were made by Facebook or the advertisers. “It’s incredibly disappointing, and also dangerous, that platforms have continued a pattern of inaction on this,” said Sarah Eagan, chief of staff at CCDH, in a recent interview. “These are known tactics used by anti-choice groups to leverage misinformation when people are at a point of vulnerability, searching for information that should be accurate about the choices that they may need to make.” She says CCDH now wants Meta to donate its profits from ads about abortion pill reversal to reproductive health organizations. She also says the company owes it to its users to develop a process to let people know that they’ve been exposed to misinformation and direct them toward better sources that have been vetted by medical experts. “There’s never been a more high-stakes time to crack down on misinformation around abortion and abortion access,” said Eagan. “This is really just a plea to Meta to do the right thing here.” Lawmakers are also taking note. In February of this year, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent to Meta asking why Facebook was continuing to promote content about a medical procedure known to be dangerous. a letter It also asked for documentation of the steps the company had taken and would take in the future to prevent the spread of abortion-related misinformation. In a March 11 responding to Nadler, Meta defended its decision to run the ads: “[O]ur rules related to misinformation, prescription drugs, or coordinating harm may apply to content about abortion,” its response read, in part. letter It noted that ads that advocate on the topic of abortion require prior authorization. “However,” the letter went on, “discussing controversial topics or espousing a debated point of view is not at odds with our Community Standards…. Meta allows posts and ads promoting legal health care services like abortion, as well as discussion and debate around abortion.” . This article was copublished with STAT, a national publication that delivers trusted and authoritative journalism about health, medicine, and the life sciences. Sign up for its health tech newsletter, delivered Tuesday and Thursday mornings, here: https://www.statnews.com/signup/health-tech/ By , , and Lauren Kirchner Maddy Varner Angie Waller Also published here Photo by on Shubham Dhage Unsplash

Facebook Ads Market Potentially Dangerous “Abortion Reversal” Procedure 

This is by (source: ). McGee is a correspondent for Financial Times. Twitter Thread Patrick McGee @PatrickMcGee_ 10-22-2021 https://twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1451619916994396164?embedable=true&thread=true Feature image generated via Prompt of ‘Google and Facebook collusion’ HackerNoon Stable Diffusion

Behind The Google and Facebook Collusion - A Thread

One of the largest pediatric networks in the country was sending personal information about children and their parents to Facebook, The Markup found. Nemours Children’s Health, which serves nearly half a million families in the U.S., had a Facebook tracking tool on its appointment scheduling website that shared details about the appointment with Facebook. The site also had a handful of other third-party trackers that share potentially sensitive information with data brokers. The Markup could not always determine what information the trackers were sending to data brokers, simply that the trackers were present. With Meta’s tracker, however, we found the Nemours site sending Facebook visitors’ IP addresses, information about the specific doctor and specialty the patient was scheduling an appointment with, and in some cases the first and last name of the child the appointment was for. That information, in combination with other data available to Facebook, could be used to link health conditions to individuals and to the Facebook profiles of their parents. And experts say the data-sharing with Facebook could violate patient privacy laws. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) covers health care providers like Nemours and services they provide, like scheduling appointments, said Charlotte Tschider, an assistant professor at Loyola University with a focus on information privacy and the health care industry. After The Markup reached out to Nemours, many of the trackers on the scheduling site were removed, but trackers from Facebook, Google, and Salesforce remained. Last week, after The Markup published a story about dozens of hospitals with Facebook, Nemours removed the Facebook tracker as well. sharing the sensitive health information of patients Not all health data is covered under HIPAA. The law specifically applies to health care providers, health insurance providers, and health care data clearinghouses. It also applies to companies that do businesses on behalf of those organizations, Tschider said. “When you are going to a covered entity’s website, and you’re entering information related to scheduling an appointment, including your actual name, and potentially other identifying characteristics related to your medical condition, there’s a strong possibility that HIPAA is going to apply in those situations,” Tschider said. The Markup found trackers on the Nemours site through our website scanning tool, . Blacklight A scan on May 9 showed the main website of the children’s health network, which boasts more than 95 locations in four states, had nine ad trackers and 10 third-party cookies. But its had more than double the number of trackers, with 25 ad trackers and 38 third-party cookies, including from companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. scheduling site There were also trackers from data brokers like Oracle, a tech giant that boasts data insights on more than , the advertising platform , and LiveRamp, which . 80 percent of the U.S. internet population MediaMath operates a data marketplace Blacklight also detected a session recorder on the page from the company Mouseflow. Session recorders can potentially track what people click on a page. Mouseflow’s website the company will sign a Business Associate’s Agreement, a legal agreement that needs to be in place to allow a HIPAA-covered organization to transfer covered health data to a third party. states When we asked whether such an agreement was in place between Nemours and Mouseflow, Mouseflow did not respond to the question. “Mouseflow does not allow the recording of PII or PHI. Mouseflow automatically masks IP addresses and all information website visitors are typing into form fields and search fields. This information is not being recorded,” Jakob Ohlsen Baagø, director of enterprise sales at Mouseflow, wrote in an email. “According to our terms, our customers are not allowed to record any PII or PHI and Mouseflow offers all the necessary tools to easily comply with this.”' Nemours Children’s Health did not respond to our requests for comment. Facebook collects data from websites , an analytics and marketing tool that developers can install on their websites. In 2018, that its pixel was embedded in more than two million websites. through the Meta Pixel Facebook told U.S. lawmakers The pixel can log specific actions on a page, like if a person on a retail site or signs of a product. The pixel is also present on non-commercial sites. adds an item to their shopping cart up for a free trial The Markup recently found . In that case, we found that Facebook was receiving such information from the FAFSA site as an applicant’s first name, last name, country, phone number, and email address. Facebook trackers on the Department of Education’s federal student aid application site Meta spokesperson Dale Hogan told The Markup that the company has systems that are supposed to detect and block sensitive health information coming from the pixel and other tracking tools. “Advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools as doing so is against our policies. While our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect, we are reaching out to Nemours Health directly,” Hogan said in an emailed statement. The Markup could not determine whether the Nemours data was in fact removed before storage, and Hogan did not comment on whether or not the data was retained or used by Facebook. A recent joint investigation by Reveal and The Markup found that the about appointments a reporter requested with crisis pregnancy centers. filters did not block information Pixels are primarily used by marketers who want to run targeted ads based on the data that Facebook collects—and hospitals aren’t immune to advertising needs. Health care companies spent more than $2.5 billion on marketing in 2018, . according to a study in the Journal of Medicine and Life The study noted that digital marketing gives the health care industry the “potential to significantly increase its coverage.” But privacy advocates worry that such marketing campaigns could end up leaking sensitive information about patients. “The hospitals have been incredibly greedy in trying to take advantage of social and digital media to capture potential new patients and to retain existing ones,” Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said. “They mindlessly adopted Facebook’s pixel at the beginning of Facebook’s expansion without thinking of the consequences.” AddThis, a marketing company that Oracle bought in 2016, has trackers on the scheduling page but not the main website. The company offers a free tool that loads tracking cookies and pixels, claiming to collect “up to 30 data points” from each visitor, . The Markup reported in 2020 “Once companies know there’s a child that’s sick in the household, you can market to that child quite differently, you can appeal to emotions better, you can market to the family,” Katharina Kopp, the deputy director of policy at the Center for Digital Democracy, said. “The data that is out there undermines our rights to move around without being profiled and compared to people like us.” Experts said HIPAA requires covered entities like Nemours to protect health information that is linked to 18 kinds of personally identifiable information, including IP addresses. “So using a name, an appointment date, or an IP address in connection with health services of a covered entity would likely qualify for HIPAA [protected health information] status,” Tschider, the Loyola professor, said. The law provides an exemption for or in specific instances where patients consent to sharing their information. de-identified health information While the Meta Pixel hashes patients’ names before it collects that data from Nemours’ website, hashing would not prevent Facebook from being able to link a patient to their Facebook profile. In addition, the data can be sent alongside Facebook cookies that allow Facebook to link a user of the scheduling site to their Facebook profile and an IP address. “It is particularly unfair to do this about children,” Kopp said. “This is going to stick with the family and the child, potentially, for the rest of his or her life.” Credits: , Alfred Ng Simon Fondrie-Teitler Also published here Photo by on Brandon Holmes Unsplash

Facebook Has Your Children's Info Thanks to This Hospital Network

Hospital Websites are Giving Facebook Sensitive Information

This article is a collaboration with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Facebook is collecting ultrasensitive personal data about abortion seekers and enabling anti-abortion organizations to use that data as a tool to target and influence people online, in violation of its own policies and promises. In the wake of a signaling the likely end of nationwide abortion protections_,_ privacy experts are sounding alarms about all the ways people’s data trails could be used against them if some states criminalize abortion. leaked Supreme Court opinion A joint investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Markup found that the world’s largest social media platform is already collecting data about people who visit the websites of hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers, which are quasi-health clinics, mostly run by religiously aligned organizations whose mission is to persuade people to choose an option other than abortion. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, prohibits websites and apps that use Facebook’s advertising technology from sending Facebook “ ” data. sexual and reproductive health After investigations by in 2019 and in 2021, the social media giant to help detect sensitive health data and blocked data that contained any of 70,000 health-related terms. The Wall Street Journal New York state regulators created a machine-learning system But Reveal and The Markup have found Facebook’s code on the websites of hundreds of anti-abortion clinics. Using , a Markup tool that detects cookies, keyloggers, and other types of user-tracking technology on websites, Reveal analyzed the sites of —with data provided by the University of Georgia—and found that at least 294 shared visitor information with Facebook. Blacklight nearly 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers In many cases, the information was extremely sensitive—for example, whether a person was considering abortion or looking to get a pregnancy test or emergency contraceptives. In a statement to Reveal and The Markup, Facebook spokesperson Dale Hogan said, “It is against our policies for websites and apps to send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools,” which includes its . advertising technology “Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it detects, and we work to educate advertisers on how to properly set up our Business Tools.” Facebook declined to answer detailed questions about its filtering systems and policies on data from crisis pregnancy centers. It’s unknown whether the filters caught any of the data, but our investigation showed a significant amount made its way to Facebook. Credit:https://www.facebook.com/privacy/center More than a third of the websites sent data to Facebook when someone made an appointment for an “abortion consultation” or “pre-termination screening.” And at least 39 sites sent Facebook details such as the person’s name, email address, or phone number. Facebook takes in data from crisis pregnancy centers through a tracking tool called the that works whether or not a person is logged in to their Facebook account. Meta Pixel The pixel is largely an advertising tool that allows businesses to do things like buy Facebook ads targeted to people who have visited their website or to people who share similar interests or demographics with their site’s other visitors. This is a mostly automated process in which the business does not have access to information about the specific users being targeted. It’s how this data is later used. not clear Crisis pregnancy centers and other businesses can choose whether to install pixel on their websites, though many website builders and third-party services automatically embed trackers. In 2020, The Markup of the 80,000 most popular sites use the ad tracker, and Facebook has said are on websites across the internet. found that 30 percent millions of pixels Facebook says pixel data can be . stored for years That personal data can be used in a number of ways. The centers can deliver targeted advertising, on Facebook or elsewhere, aimed at deterring an individual from getting an abortion. It can be used to build anti-abortion ad campaigns—and spread misinformation about reproductive health—targeted at people with similar demographics and interests. And, in the worst-case scenario now contemplated by privacy experts, that digital trail might even be used as evidence against abortion seekers in states where the procedure is outlawed. “I think this is going to be a wake-up call for millions of Americans about how much danger this tracking puts them in when laws change and people can weaponize these systems in ways that once seemed impossible,” said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the New York–based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. Facebook and crisis pregnancy centers “are operating with virtually no rules,” he said. Facebook has that are supposed to block sensitive personal data. But the platform’s filters have often proved to be porous against the vast amount of information they take in every day. policies and filters Essentially, that means the company is putting the onus on its advertising clients to monitor themselves. And Facebook does not have an incentive to crack down on violations of its advertising policies, said Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security & Privacy Group at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “That costs them money to do. As long as they’re not legally obligated to do so, why would they expend any resources to fix this?” Using Data to Make Abortion “Unthinkable” Crisis pregnancy centers market themselves as being in the “pregnancy resource” business, offering a range of free or low-cost services from pregnancy tests to baby clothing and “options consultations.” But their mission, articulated by Heartbeat International, the largest crisis pregnancy center network in the world, is : “to make abortion unwanted today and unthinkable for future generations.” far more sweeping Although many centers resemble medical clinics, the majority are not licensed medical facilities. Thus, most are not required to follow most privacy protections against the sharing of personal health information, including the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. In recent years, crisis pregnancy centers have become increasingly savvy about targeting people using sophisticated digital tools and infrastructure. Heartbeat International, for example, has developed suites of products to help individual centers improve their online presence, digital advertising, and data management. These online tools enable the centers to amass , including medical histories, details about prior pregnancies, and even ultrasound photos, and store and share that information with networks of anti-abortion partners. highly personal information As Heartbeat International says on its webpage marketing its : “Big data is revolutionizing all sorts of industries. Why shouldn’t it do the same for a critical ministry like ours?” data management system When asked about Heartbeat International’s data-sharing practices, spokesperson Andrea Trudden said, “Heartbeat International encourages all pregnancy help organizations to utilize a variety of marketing to reach those seeking pregnancy help.” But, she said, “we do not require affiliates to provide such details to us.” Crisis pregnancy centers also have been documented as spreading false or misleading information about abortion, contraceptives, and other reproductive health topics, including on Facebook. In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Facebook showed ads promoting an unproven medical procedure known as abortion pill reversal . as many as 18.4 million times Many of those advertisements were linked to Heartbeat International’s Abortion Pill Rescue Network project, which did not respond to a request for comment. How We Tracked the Data To test how Facebook and crisis pregnancy centers have been using the data the pixel collects, Reveal reporter Grace Oldham created a new Facebook profile in late April solely for this investigation. Then, while logged in to Facebook, she visited the 294 crisis pregnancy center websites that Blacklight found to have a pixel, clicking through each website and, when available, filling out appointment request forms. Oldham conducted the research in a clean browser with a cleared cache. In early May, she and Reveal data reporter Dhruv Mehrotra used Meta’s to and review the data of the clean Facebook account. Privacy Center download They found that Facebook retained data about Oldham’s interactions with 88 percent of those crisis pregnancy center websites, linking her behavior to her Facebook profile. For instance, Facebook knew Oldham had scheduled an appointment with the Pregnancy Resource Center of Owasso, Okla. That state’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, signed in late May that bans virtually all abortions from the point of fertilization and took effect immediately. a law The Owasso center did not respond to a request for comment, but after we reached out, Facebook’s tracking pixel was removed from every page on the center’s website. Our analysis found that in if Roe v. Wade is overturned, at least 120 crisis pregnancy centers sent data to Facebook about their website visitors. states that will ban most or all abortions In Tennessee, for example, where the is poised to outlaw abortion statewide, Facebook retained data from Oldham’s interactions with 11 centers. Next Steps Resources in Dunlap sent data to Facebook about every single page Oldham visited on its site. Human Life Protection Act Facebook stored that data and knew that Oldham had submitted an appointment request with the center. Next Steps’ executive director, Debbie Chandler, told Reveal and The Markup that the people she hired to manage her website and marketing disagreed that “any private information was being sent to Facebook.” Credit:Nextstepinfo.org We also found that anti-abortion marketing companies gained access to some of Oldham’s pixel data, even though she never interacted with their websites. These included Choose Life Marketing, whose website claims to help crisis pregnancy centers develop digital strategies to “reach more abortion-minded women,” and Stories Marketing, a social media marketing company for “pregnancy centers and life-affirming organizations.” Those organizations also added Oldham’s Facebook profile to audience groups capable of targeting her and people like her with ads for their services as well as anti-abortion messaging. Choose Life Marketing and Stories Marketing did not respond to requests for comment. custom In their online materials, the marketing companies explain why Facebook plays such an important role in their digital strategies. “Facebook ads have the highest return on investment (ROI) of any type of online marketing—even twice the ROI of Google Ads,” Stories Marketing , adding, “Facebook ads can also be placed on Instagram and other apps for free, extending your reach at no extra cost.” says According to : “Retargeting is an effective method of keeping your center at the forefront of their minds.… This digital marketing method can also help build credibility and trust as women go through the decision-making process because your center’s name becomes familiar to them.” Choose Life We first ran our analysis in February and repeated it using the same methodology in early May. The results of both analyses were similar. As of Tuesday, Facebook still had data about Oldham’s interactions on crisis pregnancy center websites. Abortion Data Collection “Ripe for Abuse” Cahn, of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, expressed concerns about how law enforcement agencies could use Facebook data to find people seeking abortions should the procedure become illegal in some states. “It’s ripe for abuse,” he said of Facebook’s data collection. “It seems indefensible to me that we are allowing companies to have so much power to expose our most intimate moments to these platforms and have them use it against us.” In recent years, law enforcement agencies have barraged tech companies like Google and Uber with for user data. demands Often, these legal requests don’t target individual suspects but instead compel the company to divulge data about people in a particular place or searches using specific keywords. According to the most recent data available from , the company received nearly 60,000 government requests for data from July to December 2021 and complied 88 percent of the time. Facebook’s Transparency Center Although crisis pregnancy centers could provide law enforcement with data about anyone who had voluntarily provided personal information, they probably don’t have the technology to disclose specific information about individuals who had merely visited their websites. But Facebook is different. Because the social media company can link activity on a crisis pregnancy center site to an individual’s profile, Facebook is in a much better position to divulge granular data about the center’s website visitors than the center itself. Data from search engine histories played a key role in a 2018 criminal case, in which for second-degree murder after suffering a pregnancy loss at home. a Mississippi woman was indicted The evidence included internet searches the woman had allegedly conducted for how to “buy Misoprostol abortion pill online.” The charges eventually were dropped. “There’s nothing to stop police from using Facebook ad-targeting data the same way they’ve been using Google’s data, as a mass digital dragnet,” Cahn said. Laura Lazaro Cabrera, a legal officer at London-based , said that even metadata, like the titles of webpages or URLs, can be revealing. Privacy International “Think about what you can learn from a URL that says something about scheduling an abortion,” she said. “Facebook is in the business of developing algorithms. They know what sorts of information can act as a proxy for personal data.” Getting Facebook to Fix the Problem Privacy experts have been warning for years that Facebook’s laissez-faire attitude toward how clients use its advertising technology is vulnerable to exploitation. After The Wall Street Journal and New York state regulators exposed how the social media behemoth collected sensitive user data from popular health apps that chart everything from heart rates to menstrual cycles, Facebook claimed to have implemented sophisticated filtering mechanisms to detect and prevent it from taking in sensitive health data. According to , the filters were supposed to block “70,000 terms related to topics such as sexual health and medical conditions.” the Journal But our investigation found that Facebook has continued to ingest data from webpages with obvious sexual health information— including ones with URLs that include phrases such as “post-abortion,” “i-think-im-pregnant,” and “abortion-pill.” Despite Facebook’s official policy prohibiting websites from sending it , it’s unclear what, if anything, the platform does to educate its advertising clients about the policy and proactively enforce it. sensitive health information One way for Facebook to prevent anti-abortion organizations from misusing its ad technology would be to strengthen the filters it already has in place or to discontinue the pixel tool entirely. But the reality, said Egelman of UC Berkeley, is that the company’s in advertising revenue creates a huge financial disincentive to block user information. $115 billion a year “This is their business. The more data they get, the more targeted advertising they can do, and that’s the gravy train for them: targeted ads,” he said. “If they’re proactive about cutting off sites like that, it impacts their revenue in multiple ways.” In the absence of Facebook action, Egelman says he thinks that the best fix is public pressure and tough legislation. That’s what happened last year, when critical backlash prompted Meta-owned Instagram to its plans for a kids’ version of its social media software. shelve While no comprehensive federal data privacy legislation currently exists in the United States, a called the American Data Privacy and Protection Act was released in early June that, if passed, could increase the Federal Trade Commission’s power to regulate and enforce how companies can use sensitive health data. draft of a bill Until then, however, it remains up to state legislatures to enact consumer privacy protections. Brandie Nonnecke, founding director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, said the European Union is creating stronger protections that would apply through the . Digital Services Act The new guidelines, which are awaiting formal approval by the European Parliament and E.U. Council, will require large online platforms, like Facebook, and search engines to proactively identify ways their systems could be abused and create strategies to prevent that misuse. “We’re not in a place where there is robust enough transparency and accountability on these data ecosystems and how they’re being used,” she said, “and especially the vulnerabilities to individuals.” By and Grace Oldham Dhruv Mehrotra Byard Duncan and Surya Mattu contributed to this story. It was edited by Nina Martin, Soo Oh, Rina Palta, and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick. Grace Oldham can be reached at , and Dhruv Mehrotra can be reached at goldham@revealnews.org . Follow them on Twitter: dmehrotra@revealnews.org @grace_c_oldham and . @dmehro Also published here Photo by on Glen Carrie Unsplash

Facebook and Anti-Abortion Clinics Have Your Info 

Late last year, after facing for its practices, Facebook announced : Companies buying ads would no longer be able to target people based on interest categories like race, religion, health conditions, politics, or sexual orientation. years of criticism a change to its multibillion-dollar advertising system See our data here. GitHub More than three months after the change purportedly went into effect, however, The Markup has found that such ad targeting is very much still available on Facebook’s platform. Some obvious ad categories have indeed been removed, like “young conservatives,” “Rachel Maddow,” “Hispanic culture,” and “Hinduism”—all categories we found as options on the platform back in early January but that have since disappeared. However, other obvious proxies for race, religion, health conditions, and sexual orientation remain. As far back as 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg the company had “removed the ability to exclude ethnic groups and other sensitive categories from ad targeting. So that just isn’t a feature that’s even available anymore.” told Congress The Markup found, however, that while “Hispanic culture” was removed, for example, “Spanish language” was not. “Tea Party Patriots” was removed, but “Tea party” and “The Tea Party” were still available. “Social equality” and “Social justice” are gone, but advertisers could still target “Social movement” and “Social change.” Starbucks, for example, was still able to use existing options after the change to place an ad for its pistachio latte focused on users interested in “Contemporary R&B,” “telenovela,” “Spanish language,” and “K-pop,” all proxies for Black, Latino, and Asian audiences on Facebook. Facebook hasn’t explained how it determines what advertising options are “sensitive” and, in response to questions from The Markup, declined to detail how it makes those determinations. But in the days after The Markup reached out to Facebook for comment, several more potentially sensitive ad-targeting options we flagged were removed by the company. “The removal of sensitive targeting options is an ongoing process, and we constantly review available options to ensure they match people’s evolving expectation of how advertisers may reach them on our platform,” Dale Hogan, a spokesperson for Facebook parent company Meta, said in a statement. “If we uncover additional options that we deem as sensitive, we will remove them.” Facebook’s ad targeting system is the not-so-secret key to the company’s massive financial success. By tracking users’ interests online, the company promises, advertisers can find the people most likely to pay for their products and services and show ads directly to them. But the company has faced blowback for offering advertisers “interest” categories that speak to more fundamental—and sometimes highly personal—details about a user. Those interests can be used in surprising ways to discriminate, from to to tracking users . excluding people of color from housing ads fueling political polarization with specific illnesses It’s obvious to everyone who is in the field that [removing a handful of terms deemed sensitive] is not a complete solution. Aleksandra Korolova, University of Southern California Facebook’s critics say the company has had ample opportunity to fix the problems with its advertising system, and trying to repair the platform by removing individual “sensitive” terms masks an underlying problem: The company’s platform might simply be too large and unwieldy to fix without more fundamental changes. Removing a handful of terms it deems sensitive just isn’t enough, according to Aleksandra Korolova, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. “It’s obvious to everyone who is in the field that it’s not a complete solution,” she said. Clear Proxies for Removed Terms Are Still on Facebook The Markup gathered of potentially sensitive terms starting in late October, before Facebook removed any interest-targeting options. The data was gathered through , a project in which The Markup receives Facebook data from a national panel of Facebook users. a list Citizen Browser We also gathered a list of terms that Facebook’s tools recommended to advertisers when they entered a potentially sensitive term—the company suggested “BET” and “Essence (magazine)” when advertisers searched for “African American culture,” for example. Then, also using Facebook’s tools, we calculated how similar terms were to their suggestions by viewing how many users the ads were estimated to reach, which Facebook calls an “audience.” (See the details of our analysis .) on Github To find the gaps in Facebook’s cleanup process, we then searched those terms again in Facebook’s at the end of January to see which ones the company had removed following its change. public advertising tools In some cases, we found, options still available reached almost exactly the same users as options that were removed. “BET,” the acronym for Black Entertainment Television, was removed, but “BET Hip Hop Awards,” which was previously recommended with BET and had a 99 percent overlap in audiences, was still available. “Gay pride” was also removed as an option, but by using the term “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” advertisers could still reach more than 13 million of the same users. These proxies weren’t just theoretically available to advertisers on Facebook. The Markup found companies actively using them to target ads to people on the social network. Using , we found several examples of proxies for race and political affiliation used for targeting. Citizen Browser Ancestry, the genealogy service, for example, targeted ads using the terms “telenovela,” “BET Hip Hop Awards,” “African culture,” and “Afrobeat.” Facebook removed “Fox News Channel” as a targeting option that could reach conservative users, but we saw the conservative satire website The Babylon Bee targeting an ad ridiculing Anthony Fauci using the then-still-available interest category “Judge Jeanine Piro,” a Fox News personality. Before Fox News Channel was removed, we found 86 percent of users tagged with an interest in Judge Jeanine Piro were also tagged with an interest in the cable news network. Facebook also failed to fully eliminate targeting based on medical conditions, we found. “Autism Awareness” was removed, but “Epidemiology of autism” was still available. “Diabetes mellitus awareness” was removed, but the closely related “Sugar substitute” wasn’t. We found an ad from Medtronic, a medical device company, using that term to promote a diabetes management insulin pen on Facebook. Even Facebook itself has used the proxies. We found an ad placed by the company promoting its groups to users interested in “Vibe (magazine),” a stand-in for removed terms that target Black audiences. Starbucks, Ancestry, and the Babylon Bee didn’t respond to requests for comment on their ad-targeting practices. Pamela Reese, a spokesperson for Medtronic, said the company has stopped using “Sugar substitute” as a targeting option and that Medtronic is “well within” FDA regulations for advertising medical devices. The Markup provided several examples of these potential proxy terms to Facebook, including  “telenovela,” “BET Hip Hop Awards,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and “Judge Jeanine Piro.” They were quietly removed after our request for comment was sent. Critics of Facebook like Korolova say Facebook has of promising to implement meaningful changes on its advertising platform only to fall short of the pledge. a track record Research has shown problems with advertising “proxies” for years, and Facebook could have taken stronger action to fix the problems, she argues. “If they wanted to, they could do better,” Korolova said. Facebook says its recent changes were needed to prevent abuse, but some organizations that say they use Facebook for social good have complained that the new policies put up barriers to their work. and have complained that the changes have limited their ability to reach a relevant audience. Climate activists medical researchers Daniel Carr, a recruitment consultant for SMASH Labs, a medical research group that uses Facebook to recruit gay and bisexual men for studies, said the recent changes forced them to switch from terms like “LGBT culture” to pop culture references like “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Carr said study recruitment was steady, but the change didn’t sit right with them. “It’s made it more complicated on our side, and it’s not actually changed anything, other than Facebook can now say, ‘We don’t allow you to target by these things,’ ” Carr said. “It’s a political move, if anything.” By and Angie Waller Colin Lecher Also published here Photo by on Dima Solomin Unsplash

Facebook Made a Promise. Did They Keep It?

Facebook hizo una promesa. ¿Lo mantuvieron?

Facebook a fait une promesse. L'ont-ils gardé ?

फेसबुक ने किया वादा क्या उन्होंने इसे रखा?

Facebookは約束をしました。彼らはそれを維持しましたか？

O Facebook fez uma promessa. Eles o guardaram?

Facebook đã thực hiện một lời hứa. Họ có giữ nó không?

Facebook 做出了承诺。他们保留了吗？

For millions of prospective college students, applying online for federal financial aid has also meant sharing personal data with Facebook, unbeknownst to them or their parents, The Markup has learned. This information has included first and last names, email addresses, and zip codes. After The Markup questioned the U.S. Department of Education about the tracking practice, the feature that enables sharing those details with Facebook was turned off. But personal data from an unknown number of students remains in Facebook’s hands, to be used for its own purposes. , it may retain this type of data for years. And the tracker remains on the website and continues to share some information about visitors with Facebook. According to the company’s privacy policy The Markup found that code embedded in the website where students fill out the , was automatically sending the data to Facebook. Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA The data was being collected even if the visitor to the site did not have a Facebook account and began even before the user logged in to studentaid.gov, the site that hosts the form. A spokesperson for the Department of Education initially denied that the tracking had occurred in an email to The Markup. After publication, Federal Student Aid chief operating officer Richard Cordray sent a statement to The Markup saying that, as “part of a March 22 advertising campaign,” the agency changed its tracking settings. “This inadvertently caused some user information that falls outside of FSA’s , such as a user’s first and last name, to be tracked.” StudentAid.gov normal collection efforts But The Markup’s data shows information like a user’s first name, last name, country, phone number, and email address being sent to Facebook from the site as early as January 2022, months before the mentioned advertising campaign began. The data sent to Facebook “was automatically anonymized and neither FSA nor Facebook used any of it for any purpose,” Cordray said in the emailed statement. “The pixel functionality in question was deactivated soon after the campaign ended as part of FSA’s typical campaign maintenance.” The department declined to respond to follow-up questions about when the tracking was turned on or how the department could ensure the data did not make its way into Facebook’s algorithms. Facebook has repeatedly said it blocks the collection of especially sensitive personal information. “We are in touch with [studentaid.gov] to ensure proper implementation of our tools,” Alisha Swinteck, a spokesperson for Facebook parent company Meta, said in an emailed statement. “It’s also worth noting that Meta continues to proactively educate advertisers in sensitive verticals on how to properly set-up our business tools.” The Meta Pixel—the code in question—is present on many websites, marketed to businesses and organizations as a way to track online visitors. When a website uses the code, data on the visitor is sent back to Facebook and can be used by the business or organization to find an audience for its ads. Facebook also retains that data and can use it for its own advertising purposes—although it’s not always clear what those purposes are. The pixel is extraordinarily pervasive on the web—one prime example of the sort of tracking technology that leads a pair of shoes you looked at to haunt you across the internet, or in this case, on Facebook and Instagram. Girard Kelly, director of privacy at Common Sense Media, said this sort of code is so widely available that even website operators themselves may not know how they’re tracking their visitors. “They just grab the code from Facebook, copy and paste, and they’re done,” Kelly said. “They don’t necessarily think about the implications.” , a Markup project launched in 2020, found that 30 percent of the 100,000 most popular websites use the Meta Pixel, and Facebook has said are on websites across the internet. Blacklight millions of pixels To further understand how the pixel works—and exactly what sorts of data it transmits—The Markup, in partnership with Mozilla, started . The project is a in which anyone can install in order to send The Markup data on Meta’s pixel as it appears on sites that they visit. the Facebook Pixel Hunt project crowd-sourced undertaking Mozilla’s Rally browser add-on When a user comes across the pixel on the web, the pixel sends information to Facebook about the page they visit. At the very least it tells Facebook who is visiting what pages, but it is capable of sending a lot more. It may tell Facebook which buttons the user clicked and if that person made a purchase or donation, and it sometimes sends personal information such as a person’s name or the email address they entered in a form field. Participants in the Pixel Hunt project share with The Markup what data the pixel is collecting on a given website. The Rally browser add-on detects the presence of the Meta Pixel as participants browse the web. Mozilla then collects all the data that is shared with Meta through network requests the pixel makes to Meta’s servers. For a more detailed explanation of exactly what the add-on collects and how we analyze the data, please refer to the section of our . How We Analyze the Pixel Data methodology While the pixel is widely implemented around the web, some privacy advocates say its use on a government form that includes personal information about teenagers is questionable. Federal student aid forms require a student to enter such information as their, and often their parents’ or guardians’, financial details. While The Markup does not have evidence that everything a student typed in was being collected, the pixel was configured to collect identifying information such as the student’s name, email address, phone number, and zip code, data that could be used for targeting ads on Facebook. The U.S. government to help students fund their postsecondary education. offers more than $100 billion For many students, the financial assistance is their only means of  going beyond high school—and FAFSA is the primary way to apply for federal student aid, which means that, until the Department of Education turned off tracking following The Markup’s questions, only the savviest web users could avoid sending an online application to the government without also providing potentially sensitive information to Facebook. Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, described the data collection as “horrifying,” saying the Department of Education was “asleep at the wheel” on data privacy. “They are sloppy and they are not focused on doing their job in general on the issue of privacy,” Haimson said. Tracking Aid Applicants Facebook’s pixel gathers personal information to fuel its . Advanced Matching feature By capturing information like names and addresses on third-party website visitors, Facebook can check to see whether a visitor has a Facebook account, then place advertisements based on the sites they visited. This feature allows Facebook to track its users even if they block their cookies. There are understandable reasons a government agency might want to include tracking on its pages, said Jason Kelley, associate director of digital strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The agency might, for example, want to place a Facebook ad that reminds families about an upcoming deadline to apply for aid. Using data gleaned from the pixel, the government could, theoretically at least, reach out to people who have visited the site and use Facebook. “But the fact that to do that they have to compromise the privacy of their users is a real problem,” Kelley said. For applicants who went to apply for aid before the recent change, the pixel started tracking them even before they started to fill out the FAFSA form. From the very beginning, when a visitor entered their email address on the sign-in page, that address was being sent to Facebook, The Markup found. As families filled out more of the form, the tracking continued—not just on pages requesting parents’ information but also on pages specifically meant to receive students’ personal information. A page for demographic information on the student applying for aid, for example, was sending names, email addresses, and zip codes to Facebook. Similar data was tracked on pages for student financials and even on pages asking for information on the student’s high school. Facebook generally “hashes” the data, a process that scrambles sensitive data. While it is moderately more secure than sending the data via plaintext, hashing of security. isn’t a guarantee Hashing does not prevent Facebook from using this data to match people who visit studentaid.gov to their Facebook profiles. The spokesperson for the Department of Education wrote in the emailed statement that “Federal Student Aid (FSA) does not track the names, emails, phone numbers, or street addresses of visitors to the StudentAid.gov website” but that it does use pixels “to track domains, devices, and URLs, as disclosed in the site’s .” privacy policy 2. Ad-blocking software can shut down pixel tracking, but for most visitors, tracking like this happens without their knowledge. The tool doesn’t rely on a visitor being signed in to Facebook, or even on having a Facebook account, to work. Only visitors willing to monitor the network traffic would see the data being sent to Facebook. Facebook has rules around both gathering potentially sensitive financial information and targeting ads to users under 18 years old. it doesn’t want businesses sending data like the amount of a loan or a student’s debt status to Facebook, although the list of banned practices Facebook provides “is not exhaustive,” according to the company. The company says Facebook also limits some types of ad targeting . for users under 18 years old Swinteck, the Meta spokesperson, declined to specify directly about whether the tool’s use on a government financial aid page violated any rules but said Meta works with organizations proactively to ensure compliance with its rules. Swinteck said the company also uses AI tools to detect potentially sensitive personal information. “When businesses do this, our filtering mechanism removes any potentially sensitive data it detects before that data can be stored in our ads systems,” Swinteck said. The company didn’t directly respond to a question about whether the data on students entered on studentaid.gov would be considered sensitive. Where Does the Data Go? When a company’s website uses the pixel, the company might be trying to understand visitor behavior, like what purchases users make or what pages they visit. That information can be helpful if a business wants to later reach customers who bought a certain product, for example. While there’s a potential benefit to websites placing the pixel on their pages, it’s not clear exactly how visitors’ data gathered outside of Facebook is later used by Meta. An internal Facebook document written by engineers at the company and suggested even Facebook itself often can’t say where the data it collects ultimately goes. published this week by Vice “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’ ” the document said. An unnamed Facebook spokesperson told Vice in an email that the document “does not describe our extensive processes and controls to comply with privacy regulations.… New privacy regulations across the globe introduce different requirements and this document reflects the technical solutions we are building to scale the current measures we have in place to manage data and meet our obligations.” The ways Facebook tracks users off-Facebook have sparked concern from legislators in the past. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg was brought to testify in front of Congress in 2018, for example, on how much and what kind of data the company holds on non-Facebook users, including whether the service maintains so-called “shadow profiles”—dossiers of information on nonusers of Facebook. one congressman questioned the founder Zuckerberg responded that the company holds data on nonusers for “security purposes,” like preventing third-party collection of data, and later avoided directly answering from the European Parliament, saying nonusers could clear their information. a similar question Zuckerberg did  not specify exactly what information the company collects on them. (Facebook users can view their account settings to see which advertisers target them, but the information doesn’t detail how those advertisers first got hold of users’ information or what information Facebook has on users that made advertisers target them.) Swinteck declined to answer questions about how data collected through the pixel is used to inform other parts of Facebook’s ad-targeting algorithms. , meanwhile, say the company bundles data collected from tools like the pixel with other data points to improve the effectiveness of ad delivery models and to determine the relevance of ads to people. Meta’s terms of service But practically any web user browsing the internet runs the risk of getting caught up in Facebook’s advertising machinery, experts say—including while doing something as apparently private as applying for student aid. “All sorts of companies that you don’t have any affiliation with, whether because you don’t have an account with them or because you’re not signed in, might be collecting information about you,” Kelley said. “Because the ecosystem allows that sort of data-sharing, and rewards it.” . This story was copublished with , a nonprofit news organization covering public education. Sign up for its newsletters Chalkbeat here Updates This article has been updated to reflect a statement sent to The Markup by the U.S. Department of Education after publication. An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred the the Department of Education as the DOE. Credits: & Surya Mattu Colin Lecher Also published here Photo by on Matt Ragland Unsplash

Facebook Peeked at Your Info When You Applied for Student Aid Online 

is a social media giant popular among all age groups and has been a prominent part of everyone’s lives for quite some time. Facebook Almost all social media users use Facebook which is why it consists of around 2.5 million active users monthly. This itself answers the question: Why should brands  include Facebook on their websites? Moreover, this is a significant concept and most of this will be discussed in this blog. Facebook being so prominent, no wonder brands wanted to make the most out of it. With Facebook, brands can reach more people and display diverse content. can be a lucrative strategy and help with conversions, customer acquisition, retention, sales, and much more. Embedding a Facebook feed on the website Embedding a Facebook feed on the website can be extremely easy using social media aggregator platforms like Taggbox. These platforms offer digital solutions to aggregate and display the Facebook feed on the website. You get customization features using which you can edit the background, themes, layouts, font, etc. add a CTA button, on-site visual uploads feature, and much more. With the moderation feature, you can eliminate any sensitive or inappropriate content from the feed and only display quality and relevant content to your users. With this feature, you can ask for permission from multiple users to get UGC rights and feature them ethically on your website. Let’s dig deep into this. Benefits of Embedding Facebook Feed on the website There is a plethora of benefits while embedding the Facebook feed on the website, however, we shall outline a few of them in this section. Let’s begin. Improves user engagement Facebook is a platform that contains dynamic and diverse user-generated content (UGC). People seek this platform, it can be contrasting and vibrant. Integrating Facebook into your website gives your visitors more content to explore and stay on the website. UGC helps in giving your brand a face and humanizes it. UGC is intriguing and result-driven which drives user engagement and keeps the audience hooked to your brand. Displays social proof Social proof is a phenomenon where consumers repeat the actions of their peers and adapt to others' behaviour. They believe what other people are doing is right and that the product or services they use are amazing. When people tag or mention you, it creates social proof. With strong social proof, you show that people are happy with the services you offer and are enjoying them enough to go to extra lengths and share their reviews. This is evidence that drives conversions and motivates people to visit your website. Builds trust Facebook is an old platform that has been with us for a very long time. People are comfortable with its interface and trust it more than any other platform. Gaining trust using becomes easy, with your robust presence on Facebook people and displaying authentic, happy, and satisfied users’ content you gain their trust easily. Facebook publishing tools Drives conversions Engaging users build confidence at the same time. Users do not invest in a brand they don’t trust. Facebook helps attract new customers, interact with them, and build personal relationships. The bond this approach builds is strong and loyal leading up to better conversion rates. Improves website vibrancy The website is the first point of contact between a user and a brand. Keeping it up-to-date and fresh is a fair deal. It is essential to make it interactive, attractive, and worth exploring. Adding a Facebook feed gives your audience an innovative, diver, and dynamic website experience. Is cost-effective Facebook is a free platform, and budget is a major concern of every marketer. Embedding Facebook to your website can be a pocket-friendly approach that provides the desired results at the same time. The content is created by your audience free of cost, and the cost you incur is of the platform you use to aggregate and display the feed. Better brand-user relationship Facebook is filled with user content and when you display this content on a robust marketing touchpoint like the website, it shows you care about their opinion and value them. It motivates other users to post more reviews and interact with the brand. This interaction improves the relationships you build with your existing customers. Over to you! Embedding Facebook on the website has many benefits and some of them are discussed in this blog. However, if you are afraid of where on the website can they benefit the most here is your answer. You can embed the Facebook feed on your product page to convince users to buy, add it to your catalogue pages, review section, the home page, etc. This is a lucrative approach to help elevate your brand and improve overall performance. Additionally, if you use social media aggregator platforms to embed Facebook feed on the website you get an analysis feature using which you can monitor and track the performance of your feed.

What Are the Benefits of Having a Facebook Page on Your Website?

The Dangers of Facebook Marketplace

Facebook, WhatsApp, and Your Privacy: What You Need to Know

Facebook, WhatsApp y su privacidad: lo que necesita saber

Facebook, WhatsApp et votre vie privée : ce que vous devez savoir

फेसबुक, व्हाट्सएप और आपकी गोपनीयता: आपको क्या जानना चाहिए

Facebook、WhatsApp、およびプライバシー: 知っておくべきこと

Facebook, WhatsApp e sua privacidade: o que você precisa saber

Facebook, WhatsApp và quyền riêng tư của bạn: Những điều bạn cần biết

Facebook、WhatsApp 和您的隐私：您需要知道的

This story was originally published on by , and ProPublica Craig Silverman Chris Morran Maya Eliahou Even though Facebook Marketplace is backed by the power of the social networking giant, buying and selling items through the service can still carry the same risks as making purchases on other peer-to-peer platforms or through the classified ads of the local newspaper. Buyers and sellers on Marketplace frequently know little about each other. Without taking sensible precautions, either party could end up being a victim of robbery or fraud. , while others have fallen prey to violent criminals they connected with through the popular reselling platform. Some Marketplace users have had their goods or money stolen We have put together this guide to help you avoid getting scammed. There are several red flags buyers and sellers should be mindful of when shopping on Marketplace. Facebook , and we also talked to fraud experts to better understand the warning signs of a potential scam. has its own guide for Marketplace users Before You Get Started Online marketplaces are fertile ground for identity theft, and Facebook Marketplace is no exception, with scam artists quietly taking over legitimate user accounts to add authenticity to their cons. Facebook users, even those who never intend to use Marketplace, can minimize the likelihood of having their account stolen by . setting up a security feature known as two-factor authentication This requires account holders to verify new logins through a secondary device like a smartphone that only they can access, blocking most fraudsters from illicitly logging in to their accounts. For Buyers: How to Spot a Seller Scam on Marketplace The Listing Offers a Suspiciously Low Price for a High-Demand Item. If an item is rare or popular, but the seller is listing it as readily available and at a price that’s too good to be true, it likely is. Beware of Marketplace ads for in-demand tech like smartphones or video game consoles listed at or below their retail prices. Similarly, while most cars don’t fall under the umbrella of “scarce,” a suspiciously low price tag on a vehicle should give the buyer pause for multiple reasons. The Seller Will Not Meet You in Person or Let You See the Item Before Purchase. Many Marketplace transactions are local, such as a purchase of a used sofa from someone in the next town over. There are very few good reasons a seller would refuse to finalize the purchase in person, or would make you pay for the item without having seen it first. The Seller Asks You to Pay Using Gift Cards for eBay or Another Company. Gift cards may seem like an easy enough way to pay a seller who doesn’t want to be paid in cash or instant transfer. But legitimate sellers don’t ask to be paid in gift cards, and this request is usually accompanied by a refusal to meet in person or show the item prior to payment. The Seller Refuses to Engage With You Over Facebook Messenger or Directs You to Another Website to Make the Purchase. As mentioned above, some Marketplace scammers use other people’s authentic Facebook accounts to add legitimacy to their fraudulent listing. The faux seller may want to avoid using Messenger to communicate with buyers for fear the messages could alert actual account holders that they have been hacked. Some bad actors will turn on the “vacation” setting for Facebook Messenger, which means you can only contact them via email or a website. Whatever the method, the goal is to quickly shunt buyers away from Marketplace and onto a platform where there are fewer risks of being caught or called out by Facebook users. The Seller’s Email Address Has Been Cited in Other Instances of Fraud Scammers sometimes list the same email address or similar ones as they jump from con to con. Buyers should Google the email address used by the seller, to see if it has been associated with fraud in the past. The Seller’s Marketplace Profile Shows Multiple Listings of the Same Item Targeted at Locations in Different States Click on the seller’s name to see all of their Marketplace listings. If the seller is offering the same 1997 Honda Accord in ads targeted to users in various parts of the country, odds are high the listings are fraudulent. The Seller Has Creative Explanations for Why That Price Is Suspiciously Low. When asked why the price of an item is so low, the seller might offer one of a number of elaborate narratives to explain the discount: It belonged to a relative who recently died, or maybe the seller says they are in the military and are either overseas or shipping out soon and need to unload the item before moving. The Seller Says They Will Use Ebay’s Vehicle Purchase Protection Plan for the Transaction EBay’s is a real program that provides up to $100,000 in repayment for losses associated with fraud. But it’s valid for vehicle purchases made using eBay’s platform. Vehicle Purchase Protection only Car scammers often forge documents to make it seem like a Marketplace transaction will be handled via this service. Simply put, no vehicle purchase made via Marketplace can be processed via eBay. The Seller Offers Shipping on the Item, but Refuses to Use the Facebook Checkout Service for the Purchase. Sellers can set up e-commerce stores on Marketplace and ship items to customers who pay using Facebook’s checkout product. This pay-and-ship option is only available in the U.S. If a seller asks you to pay via a method other than Facebook checkout, it’s likely a scam, and won’t be covered by Facebook’s service. Purchase Protection For Sellers: How to Spot a Buyer Scam on Marketplace They Ask to Send You a “Code” to Verify Your Identity. This is a trick that enables them to set up a number using your Google Voice account. The scammer asks for your phone number and says they will have a code sent to it to verify you are a real person. But once they have your number, they use it to set up a Google Voice account. The code being sent to you is what Google sends to a prospective customer to verify that they want to set up Google Voice for that number. If you give the scammer the code they can set up a new Google Voice account using your number, and use that to scam other people. You can read more about how this scam works . from the Identity Theft Resource Center They Refuse to Meet You in a Well-Lit Public Place of Your Choosing, or to Make the Exchange in a Police Station Parking Lot. Sellers should be wary of potential buyers who are willing to finalize the transaction in person, but not in a public place where there will be witnesses, or in the vicinity of law enforcement. A police station parking lot is perhaps the safest place for many Marketplace users to do their exchanges. The buyer is eager to get off Facebook Messenger and onto another platform to communicate. This is a red flag for both buyers and sellers. Legitimate sellers should question why a buyer wants to move their discussion and transaction off of Facebook and onto another platform where there may be less accountability. Photo by on Jackson Sophat Unsplash

12 Red Flags to Look Out For to Avoid Getting Scammed on Facebook Marketplace

12 señales de alerta a tener en cuenta para evitar ser estafado en Facebook Marketplace

12 drapeaux rouges à surveiller pour éviter de se faire arnaquer sur Facebook Marketplace

फेसबुक मार्केटप्लेस पर धोखाधड़ी से बचने के लिए 12 लाल झंडों पर ध्यान दें

Facebook マーケットプレイスで詐欺に遭わないように注意すべき 12 の危険信号

12 bandeiras vermelhas a serem observadas para evitar ser enganado no mercado do Facebook

12 Cờ đỏ cần chú ý để tránh bị lừa đảo trên Facebook Marketplace

12 个需要注意的危险信号，以避免在 Facebook 市场上被骗

Earlier this month, some users scrolling through Facebook may have seen an unexpected message, apparently from CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. Facebook , and the advertisement, which included a photo of Zuckerberg in front of a background of purple polygons, claimed to offer a chance for users to invest in a new Meta cryptocurrency. recently rebranded itself as Meta Another ad, posted around the same time and also promoted on Facebook, was tied to a page called “Metaverse” and similarly offered a shot at a presale of the upcoming “Meta token,” saying “the thrilling digital future has arrived.” The ads both included Meta’s new logo, an infinity sign. But Meta doesn’t offer any such cryptocurrency. The ads, until recently available for view in Facebook’s public ad library, were frauds that slipped through Facebook’s content moderation process, despite the use of Zuckerberg’s image and the company’s new logo. Meta’s rules for advertisers on Facebook on how ads sell cryptocurrency, but that recently placed ads for nonexistent “tokens” using the logos of large tech companies and even the faces of some of Big Tech’s most prominent people, including Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. place strict limits The Markup identified several pages While scams in Facebook ads and cryptocurrency scams have plagued platforms well beyond Facebook, these ads are particularly brazen: a network of scammers imitating the tech industry’s biggest players, on the tech industry’s largest social media platform, to shake down its users. aren’t a new phenomenon “Meta Tokens” and Other Tech Company “Coins” The ads The Markup found—about 20—are from pages with names like “Metaverse,” “Web 3.0,” “Amazon coin,” or “MSFT Web 3.0 Metaverse.” Some ads ran for days before they were pulled down, even those that prominently featured imagery like Meta’s infinity symbol logo or Zuckerberg. One of the ads linked out to a site that claimed to be associated with Meta and featured not only photos of Zuckerberg but also of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg as well as other C-suite executives at the company. The site claimed the fictional token would launch with a “BIG blastoff” on Feb. 22 and that potential investors could join a presale by making a purchase through the cryptocurrency bitcoin or Ethereum. The minimum investment: $200. The Markup found one ad, which promoted “the birth of META Token,” after it was served directly to a reporter’s personal account. Others were found through or through data , a Markup project that collects data from a paid panel of Facebook users in the United States. Facebook’s public ad library from Citizen Browser It’s not only Meta that’s being imitated in ads, we found. Other ads have used tech companies’ trademarks to push “investments” in “tokens.” One included the Apple logo and offered the opportunity to invest in a fake “iMetaverse token.” Panelists in The Markup’s Citizen Browser project saw multiple pages dedicated to nonexistent “Amazon tokens.” Pages included the e-commerce giant’s logo or photos of Bezos. Two ads, according to data from Citizen Browser, were targeted directly to users who had shown an interest in bitcoin. “You can participate in the birth of Amazon Token and be one of the first buyers,” the associated page for one ad said. “Get Started Today!” Other ads shown to our panelists featured Musk’s face and suggested an investment in a “Tesla token.” A similar ad, also seen by panelists in the Citizen Browser project, offered a token for WLMRT—a nonexistent Walmart cryptocurrency. Facebook uses a combination of AI and human moderators to flag advertisements. But the company’s human moderation is “entirely inadequate,” and it’s not clear how many scams its AI flags before they reach users, said Paul Bischoff, the editor of Comparitech, a site that rates security software and . has monitored illegal Facebook ads “We don’t really know how big the problem is,” he said, “but there’s obviously still a lot of them getting through.” The ads reviewed by The Markup are unlikely to have met the company’s standards for ads. For one, Meta’s rules include tight restrictions around any cryptocurrency ads. Potential sellers must , then submit a form to Facebook for approval before they begin to sell ads. meet specific eligibility requirements Advertisers on the platform also must be careful about how they associate themselves with Facebook. Ads so long as it’s not the “most prominent feature” of an ad. Using the company’s corporate logo is prohibited, and ads . The company’s policy doesn’t specifically mention use of “Meta.” may mention “Facebook” cannot imply an endorsement Some of the pages serving the ads were removed before The Markup reached out to Meta for comment, and the company removed others after The Markup’s request for comment. “The ads flagged to us violated our policies against deceptive and scammy behavior so we removed them,” Meta spokesperson Mark Ranneberger said in an emailed statement. “Our systems get better when people report this kind of behavior in ads by tapping the three dots in the top right corner and selecting ‘Report Ad.’ ” Other Imitators The ads aren’t the only example of Facebook dealing with imitators on its platform. In 2018, on how fake Mark Zuckerbergs were scamming Facebook users, enticing some with a fraudulent “Facebook lottery” win and then requesting payments before receiving the cash. The New York Times reported The Times uncovered hundreds of accounts on Facebook and Instagram impersonating Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Media personalities in multiple countries against Facebook after their images appeared in cryptocurrency scams, and in 2019 a court in the Netherlands ordered the company to more proactively stop scam ads that feature celebrity images. have filed suit Cryptocurrency has also become , although some high-profile busts suggest that the difficulty of tracking down transactions . a popular tool for cybercriminals has been overstated In , the Federal Trade Commission said reports of cryptocurrency fraud had “skyrocketed” and that almost 7,000 people had reported a total of more than $80 million in losses between October 2020 and May 2021—an increase of 12 times in frequency and 1,000 percent in money lost, according to the agency. a report released last year Around the internet, imitation is a strategy that pays off for those scams. Twitter, for example, has spent years dealing with scammers on its platform attempting to borrow the identity of Elon Musk. Some savvy hackers have, in the past, verified Twitter users’ accounts, switched the accounts’ profile photos to Musk’s image, and claimed to offer massive cryptocurrency rewards in exchange for a relatively small investment of cryptocurrency. taken over In its recent report on cryptocurrency scams, the FTC said it had received reports of Musk impersonators taking more than $2 million in just six months. According to the agency’s report, people in their 20s and 30s “reported losing far more money on investment scams than on any other type of fraud, and more than half of their reported investment scam losses were in cryptocurrency,” while users 50 and older were relatively unlikely to report being victims of such scams. The ad Facebook served to a Markup reporter offering a chance to get in on the ground floor of “META Token” was targeted toward American men between the ages of 30 and 64 and offered them a chance to “be one of the first buyers” of the new currency. Credits: , Colin Lecher Surya Mattu Photo by on Kanchanara Unsplash Also published here

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