For the first time ever, Consumer Reports has issued rankings based on the security and privacy of products and services, with an initial focus on peer-to-peer payment services such as Apple Pay and Venmo.
Why it matters: The nonprofit is one of the most trusted sources of information on products and companies in the United States and it intends these rankings to hold developers "more accountable."
The last 24 hours have been brutal for Alex Jones' media empire InfoWars, banned from Facebook and YouTube — and deleted from Apple's podcast library, Spotify and Stitcher.
The big picture: Alex Jones hasn't changed. His most notorious comments, including calling Sandy Hook a hoax, are years old. The platforms have changed, with a domino effect that marks a major shift in how online harassment and censorship is handled by Silicon Valley.
Researchers have used "[email protected]," a single email address listed in one of special prosecutor Robert Mueller's indictments, as a key to trace new details of the inner workings of social media disinformation campaigns.
Why it matters: The "allforusa" account was a real email address that had been abandoned by its creator and then compromised and reused, a tactic that allows hackers to evade detection and legitimize deceptive activity — in this case, including thousands of comments posted on the FCC's site about net neutrality rules.
Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president who later served as President Trump's first national economic advisor, believes social media companies like Facebook are a larger societal danger than were banks before the financial crisis, due to their dissemination of misinformation.
“In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull.”
Pinterest has become the latest tech company to pull down Infowars leader Alex Jones' page, Mashable reports. YouTube said it terminated Jones' channel earlier Monday, just hours after Facebook removed four of his pages. Apple and Spotify have also removed Infowars content over the past week for violating their conduct policies.
The big picture: The rush of Big Tech action against Jones and his organization has occurred while he is embroiled in a defamation lawsuit brought against him by Sandy Hook parents — due to his repeated false claims that the elementary school shooting is a hoax — and as his brand of conspiracy theories hit the GOP mainstream last week.
Facebook has had conversations with large banks about getting access to their customers' data for new features, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Why it matters: Facebook's recent privacy controversies may collide with its attempts to keep users engaged, and the Journal reported that one of the banks had exited conversations with the company over privacy questions. A Facebook spokesperson told the newspaper that it doesn't "use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads."
Researchers at Duo Security have developed an algorithm to hunt Twitter bots at Twitter-sized scale.
Why it matters: On a big social media platform, using humans to hunt automated scam accounts is a particularly difficult game of whack-a-mole. That is exactly the kind of problem Duo's algorithm can help solve. One of the moles it whacked during a testing was a large network of cryptocurrency scammers.
The first weekend in August is the peak of back-to-school shopping for parents, but Amazon Prime Day stealthily advertised deals that extended the shopping season over a few months.
Why it matters: Parents are expected to spend more than ever on clothing, electronics and school supplies, but Prime Day's deals last month jumpstarted the back-to-school season, allowing buyers to plan out purchases over a longer period of time instead of just one or two impulse-driven weekends.
"Nina Tomasieski logs on to Twitter before the sun rises. Seated at her dining room table with a nearby TV constantly tuned to Fox News, the 70-year-old grandmother spends up to 14 hours a day tweeting the praises of President Trump and his political allies, particularly those on the ballot this fall, and deriding their opponents," AP's Sara Burnett reports from Chicago.
The big picture: "She's part of a dedicated band of Trump supporters who tweet and retweet Keep America Great messages thousands of times a day. ... She and her friends have been swept up in an expanded effort by Twitter and other social media companies to crack down on nefarious tactics used to meddle in the 2016 election."
