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Facebook on Tuesday launched an app that will pay users to share information with the social media giant about which apps they're using. The company previously rolled out two similar apps that tracked what activities people did on their phones. But both were shut down after drawing criticism for infringing on privacy and violating Apple's App Store guidelines. Facebook said the new app, called Study, is different than the previous two and was built from scratch. And it is only available on the Google Play Store, though Facebook said it might work to expand it to iOS in the future. The new app will collect information about which apps people are using and for how long, including which app features are used. That could give Facebook valuable insight into how people use its competitors' services. Facebook said it will not track passwords or account IDs and it will periodically remind people that the app is collecting their data. Read Complete Article

Social media giant Facebook has said that it has initiated a series of measures, including blocking fake accounts to combat fake news, proactively monitor abuse and increase advertisement transparency as part of its efforts to prevent outsiders' interference in any general elections across the world. Facebook has been facing criticism for helping to spur violence and for its policies surrounding misinformation in general. ALSO READ : Facebook to use AI against suspected Russian meddling in US mid-term polls Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, had to face grilling in the US and in the European parliament over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook was accused of unduly influencing the 2016 US electoral process. The social media giant has done some work in the first half of this year to combat fake news all around the world like in Italy, Colombia, Turkey, and even the primaries for US midterms. By the end of the year it will have focused...

The private posts of around 14 million Facebook users were made public due to a software bug. The users, whose posts typically defaults to a preselected privacy setting, didn't know that a simple message to a person is actually being shared with the general public due to this bug. This bug was active from May 18 to May 27. It changed users' privacy settings to public, without them knowing. ALSO READ: Govt seeks explanation from Facebook by June 20 over data sharing The company said the problem has been fixed, adding that it will notify the 14 million users who could have been affected, starting Thursday. ALSO READ: Facebook announces original news shows, harps on 'trusted content' "Starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. We'd like to apologize for this mistake," CNBC quoted the chief privacy officer Erin Egan as saying. ALSO READ: How private is your...

With European and US lawmakers calling for investigations into reports that Facebook user data was accessed by UK based consultancy Cambridge Analytica to help President Donald Trump win the 2016 election, investors are asking even more questions about the social media company's operations. An increasingly vocal base of investors who put their money where their values are had already started to sour on Facebook, one of the market's tech darlings. Facebook's shares closed down nearly 7.0 per cent on Monday, wiping nearly $40 billion off its market value as investors worried that potential legislation could damage the company's advertising business. Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is facing calls from lawmakers to explain how the political consultancy gained improper access to data on 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica said it strongly denies the media claims and said it deleted all Facebook data it obtained from a third-party ap...