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FTC may seek injunction to prevent Facebook from merging chat features across Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp

December 12th, 2019

The FTC may seek an injunction in order to prevent Facebook from tightly integrating features across its suite of messaging services. The potential injunction, The Wall Street Journal notes, arises out of fear that once the integration is complete, breaking up Facebook into disparate entities would become difficult, if not impossible. Word of Facebook’s plan …

Tech

It’s not just you: Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger are down

November 28th, 2019

Mike Wehner

Happy Thanksgiving! Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger all appear to be sleeping in on this most festive of holidays, as reports of a full-on outage are spreading across the internet. The trusty website Downdetector reveals that problems began shortly before 9 a.m. EST, and at the moment the outage only seems to be affecting Facebook’s …

Tech

TikTok is the hottest new thing in social, so Facebook is obviously copying it

November 12th, 2019

Chris Smith

Remember how quick Facebook was to steal every popular feature Snapchat in the past few years and add them to its own apps like Instagram and the Facebook app itself? Well, the company is about to rinse and repeat, but this time around it’s going after a different company. TikTok is the hottest new social …

Tech

It’s bizarrely easy to see private Instagram posts and share them with anyone you want

September 10th, 2019

Chris Smith

Facebook has been doing its best to convince us that it’s concerned about user privacy and security, but it’s not doing a great job. Just a few days ago, we saw the latest proof that Facebook isn’t ready to protect all of your data. And if you wanted more proof that you should be careful …

Tech

New Instagram chat app will encourage you to share location and real-time data with ‘close friends’

August 27th, 2019

Chris Smith

After killing Direct, which was supposed to be Instagram’s own messaging system, Facebook is going to unveil a new chat app that will be tied to Instagram accounts, as if the world needed more Facebook messaging apps. However, an Instagram-based chat app can play a more prominent role in Facebook’s ecosystem. Messenger and WhatsApp are …

Tech

Facebook uses AI to analyze and catalog every single photo you upload

July 5th, 2019

Chris Smith

A Facebook outage that also affected Instagram and WhatsApp on Thursday revealed what may be a surprising development to some Facebook users: the company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to catalog the contents of every photo you upload to its servers. Every. Single. Photo.

Tech

Facebook wants to let you share your WhatsApp status to Facebook and Instagram

June 27th, 2019

Chris Smith

What’s the first thing you can think of when you hear that Facebook is considering allowing WhatsApp users to share their status updates to Facebook, Instagram, and other apps? If you said “Cool,” that’s understandable — it could be a cool feature! If you think it’s creepy, you’re also right, because this sort of functionality …

Business

Instagram just said you’re going to start seeing even more ads, which we didn’t think was possible

June 26th, 2019

Andy Meek

Not that this should surprise anyone, but you’re about to start seeing more ads on Instagram now that the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app has announced a new place it’s going to start slotting them in. Very soon, the company announced today, you’ll start seeing ads show up within the Explore page, one of the parts of …

Tech

Instagram will make it easier to recover your password if your account is ever hacked

June 17th, 2019

Chris Smith

Whether they’re attempting to steal your Instagram account to sell it back to you for Bitcoin, or whether they have different plans with it, hackers are more and more interested in gaining access to Instagram properties. A process of recovering access to a hacked account does exist but doesn’t always work, so Instagram has announced …

Tech

Instagram is down, so users are flocking to Twitter to complain

June 13th, 2019

Andy Meek

Users around the world began reporting Thursday afternoon that they’re unable to access their Instagram accounts, with the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service apparently suffering a major outage. The problems didn’t appear to be uniform, with some users saying they couldn’t perform searches on the site or uses certain parts, while some users appear not to be …