The Hottest App Right Now? One Where Teens Have to Say Nice Things About Each Other

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; ISTOCK; GAS APP

“TBH was hot. Five years ago, the app, which prompted teens to compliment one another, topped Apple’s App Store charts and quickly amassed millions of users in the coveted high-school demographic. Facebook Inc. snapped it up less than three months after launch—and soon shut it down.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hottest-app-right-now-one-where-teens-have-to-say-nice-things-about-each-other-11665940854

Facebook Engineers Admit They Don’t Know What They Do With Your Data

“We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere,” the document read. “How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjk3wb/facebook-engineers-admit-they-dont-know-what-they-do-with-your-data

Texas Sues Meta Over Facebook’s Facial-Recognition Practices

Image c/o wsj.com

The Texas attorney general filed a suit against Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. on Monday, charging that the social-media giant’s longstanding and now discontinued use of facial-recognition technology violated that state’s privacy protections for personal biometric data.

The lawsuit, filed in state district court in Marshall by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeks civil penalties in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a person familiar with the matter.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-sues-meta-over-facebooks-facial-recognition-practices-11644854794

Zynga founder Pincus cashes in on acquisition after 15 years navigating boom-bust cycle

Image: via CNBC

In the 15 years since he started Zynga as a poker game for Facebook, Mark Pincus twice gave up the CEO role while guiding his gaming company through early rocket ship growth, a historically disappointing post-IPO stretch and a choppy history of pricey acquisitions.

But one thing he never did was dump the majority of his stock.

Ari Levy @levynews

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/11/zyngas-mark-pincus-cashes-in-after-15-years-of-boom-bust-cycle.html

Company formerly known as Facebook unceremoniously kills off ‘Oculus’ brand

Image Credits: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile / Getty Images

“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either,” Zuckerberg said.

Well, it turns out that’s not so true. In a lengthy Facebook post, CTO-in-waiting Andrew Bosworth detailed about 15 minutes later following the completion of the keynote that as part of the new rebrand, they will be killing off the Oculus brand.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/28/facebook-errr-meta-unceremoniously-kills-off-oculus-brand/

Facebook is changing its name to Meta as it focuses on the virtual world

Facebook employees unveil a new logo and the name ‘Meta’ on the sign in front of Facebook headquarters on Oct. 28 in Menlo Park, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said at Connect, the company’s annual event focused on virtual and augmented reality. “Facebook is one of the most-used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do. Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/facebook-meta-name-change/