Articles about Facebook

Workforce diversity is something that has been brought into sharp focus in recent months as companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook reveal the make-up of their staff. White, middleclass, male employees dominate the world of technology, and this is certainly the case at Facebook -- even if a redesigned icon was an attempt to bring women to the fore.

Now the social network is embarking on something of a PR campaign, desperate to prove that it is doing everything it can to develop as diverse a workplace as possible. Today Facebook publishes sections of its employee training program that aims to eradicate the 'unconscious bias' that leads to -- in Facebook's words -- 'black sounding names' getting fewer callbacks than 'white sounding names'.

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Facebook comes in for a lot of criticism, but one thing that managed to rub a lot of people up the wrong way is its real names policy. For some time the social network has required its users to reveal their real name rather than allowing for the adoption of pseudonyms. This has upset many, including musicians and the drag community.

Now a German watchdog has told Facebook that its ban on fake names is not permitted. The Hamburg Data Protection Authority said that the social network could not force users to replace pseudonyms with real names, nor could it ask to see official identification.

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Mark Zuckerberg's Internet.org has come in for quite a lot of criticism since it launched. Designed to help get the entire world online, it has been argued that the program is in opposition to the idea of net neutrality and many of its backers have pulled out or complained about things since it kicked off.

But in many regards none of this matters -- it is the numbers that are important. Twelve months after the launch of Internet.org, more than a billion people have been connected to the internet free of charge. Moving into year two, the next part of the operation involves scaling things up.

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Videos on Facebook are big business. As well as drugged up post-dentist footage, there is also huge advertising potential. Now Facebook has announced a new set of options for video publishers -- including the ability to limit who is able to see videos based on their age and gender.

A social network might not be the first place you would think of to try to keep something private, but a new 'secret video' option makes it possible to restrict access to those people who have a direct link. Other new options include the ability to prevent embedding on other sites, but it is the audience restriction settings that are particularly interesting.

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When Hacking Team was hacked, a massive cache of data was leaked, including the source code for government-strength surveillance tools. Hacking Team warned that the code could have fallen into terrorist hands, but then backtracked slightly to say that any code that had been obtained was incomplete and out of date.

We already know that the company managed to sneak malicious apps into Google Play, and you might be concerned that some of its malware has made its way onto your computer. To help put minds at rest -- hopefully -- Rook Software has released a tool to seek out Hacking Tool malware.

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Facebook wants to make Messenger appeal to as many people as possible, so, last month, it announced that it will no longer require new users to have a Facebook account in order to use its increasingly popular messaging service. The feature was initially said to be offered in just a handful of markets, US, Canada, Peru and Venezuela.

Now, the feature is made globally available according to Facebook's David Marcus. Just like in the first markets, all that new users need to sign up for Messenger is their phone number.

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Add a few friend on Facebook, join a few groups, and follow a few people you know and your Facebook feed can collapse into a jumbled mess. The way Facebook's algorithm works means it's all too easy to see too much stuff you're not really interested in, and miss what you want to see most.

Today the social network is rolling out a new set of options that can be used to gain better control of what you see. The latest update gives prioritization options so you can be certain that you'll always see posts from a particular friend. Will it be enough to please those who are critical of how things work at the moment?

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Facebook has been busy updating its look. It's very subtle, so you'd be forgiven for missing it. Following on from last week's incredibly understated logo change (just believe us, the font is slightly different) comes an update to the friends icon. A minor thing, you might think, but with the current focus on diversity, it's one that is noteworthy.

The social network comes in for constant criticism; just about everything it does gets a negative reaction. If it's not complaints about Internet.org, it's the company's lackadaisical attitude to privacy. If people are not whining about changes to their news feed, they are questioning censorship. One Facebook designer was unhappy with the way the friends icon pushed a male figure to the front, while the female symbol shrank into the background. So she redesigned it.

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Ever wanted to know when one of your Facebook friends deletes you? Well now there’s an app that’ll tell you that and more.

Unsurprisingly named "Who Deleted Me on Facebook", the app shows you which accounts have unfriended you, which have become deactivated and who is online.

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Need a social network to connect with friends and likeminded individuals? Take your pick; there are dozens to choose from. Facebook remains by far the most popular and, as it is used by real people, it is filled with everything that makes up life -- the good and the bad. In response, a group of Evangelical Christians in Brazil set up Facegloria with the aim of becoming "morally and technically better than Facebook".

Actually the real aim of the site is to promote Christianity -- to the extent that rather than a Like button, there is an Amen button. Think "godbook", if you will. Of course there are restrictions -- religion isn’t meant to be fun, you know. On the list of banned content is violence and pornography, swearing (there are literally hundreds of banned words), anything that violates "biblical principles", and depicting or referring to homosexual activity.

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Social giant Facebook has been in talks with music labels for the past few months, although nobody is quite sure what the company is planning.

Reports say Facebook has met with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, three of the big music licensing labels. Since this doesn’t seem to involve indie labels, we can assume it isn’t a music streaming deal, but instead a licensing and content protection deal.

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Remembering all of the passwords required to gain access to all of your online accounts is a pain. You could opt to use a password manager, or you might decide to use the same password for everything. But Blogging platform Medium.com has another option -- just don't use one!

The site has been anti-password for some time; users log into their accounts using an existing Twitter or Facebook account. For people who are not social network users, however, there's a new option. Working in a similar way to the 'I've forgotten my password' system used by many sites, Medium allows users to log in using nothing but their email address -- and says the system is more secure than regular passwords.

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The 2013, Facebook’s failure to acquire Snapchat for $3 billion went across the world like a forest fire. Since then, it seems that the social networking giant has adopted some of the best features of Snapchat and has simply started including them in their apps.

The Facebook Slingshot app is one example of the social networking giant’s attempt to imitate Snapchat. The app lets users send colourful drawings and text to friends similar to Snapchat. Other features such as filters, text, and stickers are now added to the list.

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Facebook has added security firm Kaspersky Lab to its roster of antivirus companies protecting its users from malicious software, the social media site has announced.

In a blog post by Facebook Security, the company said it is keeping users’ computers safe just by using Facebook, in the way that Kaspersky Lab, together with the likes of ESET, F-Secure and Trend Micro, runs a clean-up tool in the background while you use the social network.

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Like transparency reports, diversity reports have become quite the fashion at the moment. Companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon are keen to demonstrate that they are not dominated by white, middle-class men, and that they are open to the full gamut of gender identities and sexualities. Today Facebook released its second diversity report showing that at Mark Zuckerberg's company things haven’t really improved over the last year.

More than half of the workforce (55 percent) is white, and at senior leadership level this jumps all the way up to nearly three quarters (73 percent). The percentage of black workers at the social network is incredibly low -- just 2 percent. The gender balance is largely skewed as we have come to expect. Across the company 68 percent of employees are male, although in 'non-tech' roles women make up 52 percent of the team. For those striving for equality, the numbers make for somewhat depressing reading.

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