Facebook Policy, Google Product Changes – Spotlight #288
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Good Monday morning. Welcome to April. Be careful online today because the Internet loves April Fool’s Day. You’re a Spotlight reader. Don’t let ’em get you.

News to Know Now 

  • Facebook has banned white nationalism and white supremacy. Yes, they can. Support for or posts about either are grounds for Facebook action, including account cancelation. Read their announcement, Standing Against Hate. 
     
  • Personal data including bank info improperly shared to contractors by FEMA we told you about last week will test the Trump Administration’s resolution to hold government officials liable according to new Washington Post analysis.
     
  • The federal government also charged Facebook with housing discrimination by allowing advertisers to select the demographics of people who can view ads. We’ve written extensively about this including last week. Other tech companies remain under investigation.

Breaking Sunday night
Facebook announces a “Why Am I Seeing This Post” feature.
Here’s the announcement complete with screenshots and video.

Google Product Changes

Expect to see longer content online. Google has told webmasters that it doesn’t use that helpful prev/next link you see to paginate long web content. That was a guideline they published more than 7 years ago and rescinded–but never told the tech community about rescinding.

The SEO world wanted to know when Google made that decision. Industry liaison John Mueller confirmed that it was “years ago”. The best line we read was from Edwin Toonen at WordPress SEO dev shop Yoast. “Sometimes you wonder if Google even knows how Google works.”

Indeed. And the bigger issue is Mueller’s admonition that “each page on a website should stand on its own.” We’ve always been fanatical about including internal links for context all over long-form content. That’s something your organization should be looking at soon because when asked if Google still captured the information to create a page sequence for long content, Mueller admitted that Google hadn’t used the data in years.

Also note Google’s official stance: studies show that users love single-page content.

Google’s hotel listings will also get a bit more crowded. The newly redesigned feature will now include vacation rentals, the company announced Tuesday.  The new listings appear now on mobile and will begin appearing on desktop searches during April. Check out the new interface.

If you remember or still use Patch’s  hyperlocal news websites, you’re going to love Google’s announcements about its investment in a new project called the Local Experiments Initiative. News publisher McClatchy will operate digital-only news websites in markets of fewer than 500,000 people. Google’s role is monetary – investing what it says will be millions of dollars. Google and WordPress are also collaborating on a customized version of WordPress for local media. If all that sounds familiar, AOL bought Patch from its founders for $7 million ten years ago before pumping tens of millions more into the venture before selling it in 2014.

Local news interests everyone. We saw that in a great Slate feature this weekend that examined the most shared news story on Facebook this YTD. It’s a 119 word story (really) posted to the Facebook page of a  Temple, Texas radio station. Read the Slate analysis of this fun story.
 

2. Numbers to Know

Now add up YouTube, Netflix and Facebook video to reach 41.9%. Also consider that Snapchat (8.3%) and Instagram (5.7%) are visual channels, and it’s easy to project that more than half of the world’s mobile traffic is image-based.

We often write about Big Data although not usually McDonald’s. The massive restaurant chain is embracing analytics and business intelligence to the tune of a $300 million acquisition of analytics firm Dynamic Yield. On tap: drive through displays customized on the fly, ordering and supply chain improvements, and even recognition of repeat customers based on license plate readers. The company will continue operating separately, a move analysts are quick to point out only enhances the decision making abilities of the firm that has dozens of brand-name clients including AutoNation, American Greetings, Ikea, Cabela’s, and Weber.

Describing this last bit of Internet number data won’t do it justice. Click to see a comparison of what happens in each minute on the Internet this year compared to one year ago. A quick sample:

  • 4.5 million YouTube videos viewed (up from 4.3)
  • $996K in revenue (up from $862K)
  • 3.8 million Google search queries

See the inforgraphic here

Articles

Good Monday morning. It’s March 18th. Spring allegedly begins this week.

Google makes a mystery announcement on Tuesday that they’ve teased will “unveil its vision for the future of gaming.” The current state of gaming is around $140 billion annually so their take would be interesting. Just like search and advertising, about half of that amount comes from mobile.

News to Know Now

  • Facebook’s outage on Thursday included Instagram and other Facebook properties. It’s the biggest outage the company endured since allowing widespread public access in 2006.  
  • Social media was criticized by many in the immediate aftermath of Friday’s gun massacre in New Zealand. But we’ll look at the facts of what people can reasonably expect in situations with fast breaking news.
  • Google confirmed a “core algorithm change” took place March 1. Core updates occur only a couple of times each year and affect Google’s main search engine algorithms rather than the specific, more focused changes that happen daily.
This is part of  Silver Beacon’s live website traffic display.

We can toggle them to different metrics and watch multiple clients throughout the day.  But it’s important to remember issues like seasonality (which caused the growth in the second site shown) and different externalities. 

Knowing the history helps us understand any shifts.

1.  Murder Videos Online

Facebook stopped 1.2 million copies of the video streamed during the New Zealand massacre from being uploaded. Another 300,000 were taken down after they were uploaded. The white supremacist who murdered people at worship seemed to have a good working knowledge of how social media works online.

  • This had nothing to do with Facebook or YouTube any more than the post office is involved with an illegal scam or the phone company when someone calls in a bomb threat.
  • Stop and ask this question: who tried to upload the video 1.5 million times to Facebook? Those are the people deserving of your anger.
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren was upset when Facebook automatically removed ads her campaign posted calling for its breakup. Facebook replied this week that ads using its logo are blocked. 
    • Uploads happened all over the Internet, not just Facebook and Youtube. 
    • A Reddit channel called r/watchpeopledie showed images of people hit by cars and other deaths for 7 years. There are 300,000 subscribers.
    • Where does Facebook draw the line between recognizing problem imagery?
    • Are trailers for R-rated movies okay? What about news coverage of wars?

YouTube has the same problem. So does every website. There were still copies of the video available on Sunday on many different websites in New Zealand. YouTube told The Verge that they can stop child pornography well, but their systems aren’t designed for “urgent situations”. That’s fair. No one is going to catch a murder or suicide being live-streamed. And the company deliberately errs on the side of having news-related videos stay online. Think the Arab Spring, riots in Venezuela, and war throughout the world.  

YouTube Kids exists for children under the age of 13. The company is explicit that children under the age of 13 are not permitted to use the main service. That’s reasonable although we’ve all seen parents and others plop a kid in front of videos.  I’m sympathetic. After once grounding one of my children from the Internet, the then-enterprising student used his game console to access a neighbor’s WiFi signal and went about whatever it was he did online then.

Humanity has shown that we are not good at putting genies back in bottles. We are hopeful Big Tech will solve this problem, but let’s not forget that 1.5 million attempts were made to upload this horrific video to Facebook in only 24 hours.

2.  Facebook’s Troubling Carousel


Facebook is an easy target. No one seems to really like it except for the couple of billion people who access it as much as several times a day. Much was made of 15 million U.S. users quitting last year.  The company deserves to be pilloried for some of the ways it has handled data in the last decade, but it’s certainly not alone. 

Last week was especially bad for the social media giant besides the ridiculously long outage on Thursday  that TechCrunch reported caused 3 million people to sign up for new Telegram accounts. Besides the outage, the Christchurch videos, and temporarily blocking Senator Warren’s ads, these things happened:

  • Chris Cox, the company’s #3 exec, announced Thursday that he was leaving. So did another executive who was running Whats App after that company’s founders left. Their moves are widely regarded to be a response to the idea of combining Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. But it’s a big shakeup because Cox was an early Facebook tech voice.
  • Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp and received nearly $4 billion in Facebook money when it was sold to them, repeated his advice that users should “delete Facebook now”.  Acton left the company in November of 2017 after Facebook monetized WhatsApp traffic by placing ads inside the app.
  • Data deals that Facebook signed with more than 150 companies are under criminal  investigation by a grand jury according to The New York Times.
    • It’s not just data causing trouble at Facebook. A Fast Company article in February reported that “a shockingly large majority of health news shared on Facebook is fake or misleading.”  Read it here.
    • The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard links many problems back to Facebook’s de-emphasis of news sites. Their analysis published this week is “One year in, Facebook’s big algorithm change has spurred an angry, Fox News-dominated-and very engaged!-News Feed.“


The bottom line: Facebook will survive and continue thriving despite fines and legal brickbats until people find a substitute for the communication need the site currently fulfills.

Also in the Spotlight

Worth your time this week:

  • More than 600,000 people in Michigan may have had their health records compromised by a data breach affecting a company that works with providers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and McLaren Health Care. Attorney General Dana Nessel’s announcement.
  • Google introduced Be My Eyes last year. The free app connects visually impaired people with sighted volunteers for assistance describing an area or situation. Now the company has announced that it will work with Be My Eyes to set up free help from Google Disability Specialists each weekday. Their announcement.
  • Firefox Send is a new free service. The service allows people to send an encrypted file safely from a browser. And it will even be available on Android later this year. Files up to 1GB can be sent free by anyone while files up to 2.5GB require a free registration. Neither the sender nor the recipient need to use a Firefox browser to access the file. Details.
Online Data Trove of Passwords Grows to Over 2 Billion
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Spotlight

News You Need to Know Now

 

Good Monday morning. It’s February 4th. Google parent company Alphabet announces earnings when the markets close this afternoon.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read.

Breaking Sunday night: Family Tree DNA is vehemently denying media reports that it has given the FBI access to its database of more than one million genetic profiles. Family Tree says that the FBI has the same permissions that any consumer has and that law enforcement has used the free-to-all service fewer than ten times.

 

Highlights

 

  • Amazon and Facebook posted record financials last week. Analysts liked Facebook’s story and rewarded the company’s stock. Amazon warned that it would invest more in 2019, and its stock took a hit despite record holiday earnings. Remember that the execs involved most often are compensated based on stock performance, not earnings.

 

  • The FCC was in court before a three judge panel Friday to present oral arguments regarding its rollback of net neutrality consumer protections. Among the FCC’s arguments was the contention that broadband is not a telecommunications service. The FCC also faced questions about Verizon throttling service used by the Santa Clara Fire Department as they fought deadly wildfires last year.

 

  • Hackers uploaded password and email combinations in more files last week, bringing the total to 2.2 billion password records that researchers say have now been downloaded more than 1,000 times. Please stop right now if you’re using your old passwords “now that time has passed”.

Wild Online Data Days Continue

 

Apple users, pay attention to the Group FaceTime bug called Face Palm. The company confirmed that users could add a third person to a FaceTime call, creating a Group, and eavesdrop on the person who was being added even if that person didn’t answer. Apple disabled group video chatting last week and is due to push out an update to users this week.

Apple was also on the dishing out side of things after it learned that Google and Facebook had both violated their App Store agreements and promoted programs that captured lots of data. Facebook’s case was egregious because Apple had already made Facebook remove a similar program. Instead, Facebook launched an online data program targeting people between the ages of 13 (with parental consent) and 35. They paid each person $20 per month to load a program on their phone that allowed Facebook to see virtually everything that was done on the phone. Plenty of survey companies do exactly this, but Facebook bypassed Apple’s App Store, and Apple responded by revoking Facebook’s developer access permission for nearly three days.

When Apple discovered that Google was doing something similar, they also revoked Google’s access even though this was their first offense.

The control that Apple places on its App store far outweighs anything that Google does for Android apps. And Apple is ruthless about protecting this advantage. We learned during Apple’s financial reports that its revenue sharing from Netflix alone is $130 million per year. For accounts smaller than Netflix, Apple’s revenue sharing costs publishers 15-20 percent of total revenue. And you thought that only their phones were expensive.

Children and teens are also spending millions on Facebook apps and games that parents are often unaware of, according to reporting by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The organization reported that Facebook’s chargeback rate for contested credit card charges made by children is more than 9 percent–18 times the regular rate.

Even municipalities are getting involved. New York City will begin receiving data from Uber and Lyft as part of its agreements allowing them to operate. Among the data being received is date, time, locations, and the route driven. The city says that its goal is traffic planning and new programs, but skeptics have already pointed out that the database when combined with cameras and taxicab data provide the city with a database of non-private vehicle travel.

Some Help Is Coming

Google’s Chrome browser will warn users when it is visiting a spoofed website. It’s still in an early beta, but I’ve tested it, and it’s got promise.

What’s App–one of Facebook’s most popular programs–will start limiting the number of times that a message can be forwarded in an effort to cut down on disinformation.

New York’s Attorney General reached a settlement last week that it says is “…the first finding by a law enforcement agency that selling fake social media engagement and using stolen identities to include in online activity is illegal.” Gizmodo has an excellent summary of what it means and how it came to be.

EU regulators also continue pursuing tech data issues. Polish and UK authorities last week began taking action to limit an online advertiser’s ability to identify and target a consumer who has been the victim of sexual abuse, substance abuse, or medical conditions. This has fallen into the “we know how to do it technically, but it’s not permitted and it’s evil” bucket. Regulators would like to put that into the “make it impossible to do” bucket.

Reporter Kashmir Hill–one of our favorites and one whose work we’ve referred to you before–is publishing a fantastic series called “Life Without the Tech Giants”.  She is a data privacy expert who is enlisting great tech resources to help her block companies like Google and Amazon from her life. And as she writes, it’s not always working. Start with her intro to the series here.

 

Spotlighted

Worth your time this week:

  • Google is finally removing Google+ data from the publicly-accessible Internet. Your stuff–if there was any there-will be deleted April 2.
  • Snopes is ending its fact-checking partnership with Facebook.
  • Steve Buscemi’s face on Jennifer Lawrence’s body? It’s not a Snickers commercial. It’s a well done 75 second Deep Fake video that reporter Mikael Thalen posted to Twitter.