With the success of Meta's camera glasses, there is now a risk of being recorded without consent or knowledge and ending up exposed in a crude video on TikTok or Instagram.
The manufacturers claim that a subtle light on the frame indicates when they are filming. It is not always easy to see the light, and anyway it is trivial to disable it.
The new version of Nova Launcher, a popular launcher for Android, brought an unwanted new feature: advertising trackers from Meta and Google. On Exodus, a non-profit app auditing platform, you can see the changes from the previous version (8.1.6) to the new one (8.2.4).
Nova Launcher was purchased by Sweden's Instabridge a few months after the launcher's creator left Branch, the company that bought the app in 2022 and promised to open its code — which never happened. Instabridge has confirmed that it is testing ads in Nova Launcher and that it will not display ads to those who have Nova Prime (paid version).
Let's get straight to the point: living without Instagram, Facebook, and Threads (lol) is easy. The only setbacks I can think of are missing out on Facebook Marketplace listings and the lack of information about restaurants, cafes, and clinics that insist on limiting their digital presence to Instagram. It's inconvenient, but workable.
In many parts of the world outside the US, the “big boss” of those who decide to get rid of Meta is WhatsApp. And how could it not be? Some research on phone habits shows that up to 99.1% of Brazilians over the age of 16 use the messaging app. Here, it is ubiquitous; the standard means of communication for many people and companies.
Part of most people’s learning curve when they start coding is trying projects that, with luck, might become useful to themselves and others. In May I wanted to get a better handle on the WhatsApp API. I set up my local environment, logged into Meta’s developer platform and started poking around.
I grabbed a test number the platform provided, sent a “Hello World” and tried a few basic commands for the architecture I was sketching. A few weeks later I had to set the project aside.
When I tried to pick it up again a few weeks ago, I was alarmed by the message on Meta’s developer page:
Reuters shed light on Meta’s lucrative business built on selling fraudulent ads on its platforms — Facebook and Instagram. Internal company documents obtained by the news agency show that 10.1% of Meta’s 2024 revenue, or US$ 16 billion, came from fraudulent/scam ads.
A December 2024 document shows Meta running an average of 15 billion fraudulent ads per day. Those add to 22 billion pieces of suspicious “organic” content (unpaid) — from hacked profiles offering crypto schemes to promises of miracle cures in groups, and fake listings on Facebook Marketplace.
In March, in a rare moment of sobriety from the artificial intelligence drug, a revamped Mark Zuckerberg — gold chain around his neck, wild hair — promised that Facebook, or at least part of it, would return to simpler times, when the social network was… well, a social network. An innocent era when he himself looked like a wax figure rather than a wannabe rapper.
It’s almost impossible to escape WhatsApp and very difficult to get rid of Instagram. For many, it’s also undesirable. Friends, relatives, loved ones, and the entire presence of many businesses are only available on one or the other (or both).
In 2022, when I wrote about a “more affectionate approach” to technology (pt_BR), I had recently returned to using these and other commercial platforms. I lowered my defenses in an attempt to be more present, to participate more.
The problem with companies like Meta is that every concession on our part is exploited to the fullest.
Remember when WhatsApp was just a lightweight messaging app? I miss those days. Today there are so many features, so many announcements of new stuff that sometimes useful ones slip by unnoticed.
By chance, the other day I came across “Advanced chat privacy,” available in group and individual conversations. It was released in April.
When activated, three things happen:
@meta in a conversation.Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), there isn’t a global button to activate advanced privacy in all conversations; only within each conversation’s options.
Given the impossibility of using a better app, like Signal, it’s a good option to activate when sensitive topics are being discussed.
Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion, I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.
AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.
It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.
Antitrust trials in US courts may be the country’s greatest contribution to humanity after eggs benedict and the golden age of Hollywood.
On Monday (14th), one of the most anticipated trials in recent times began, in which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accuses Meta of monopolizing the personal social networking market by blocking potential competitors through its billion-dollar acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. One possible remedy is the breakup of the company, restoring Instagram and WhatsApp as independent alternatives and rivals to Facebook.
Instagram raised the wall that separates people who do not have an account from those who do. Since at least April 21st, Instagram doesn’t allow unregistered people to view photos and videos from public profiles on computers and tablets.
Public profiles, those that don’t have the padlock that restricts content to registered followers, have always been accessible regardless of login. Not anymore.