After Facebook made its "Download Your Info" tool more prominent, and yesterday announced that a similar tool will be heading to WhatsApp, Instagram users are now able to download their information too. It's not entirely because Facebook still feels bad about the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Instead, the feature's addition is in compliance with the European Union's upcoming General Data Protection Regulation. The feature will allow Instagram users to download their photos, videos, Insta Stories, and a host of personal information including your snappy bio and comments. Instagram notes that gathering all this data may take as long as 48 hours. But accessing it...
Facebook's raising WhatsApp's minimum age to 16 in Europe, as the company prepares to iron its shirt ahead the forthcoming instalment of the General Data Protection Regulation. At present, teenagers as young as 13 can sign up to use the messaging service, in similar vein to Facebook's other properties. It's not clear if the company's will review its minimum age on its other services too. Nevertheless, new users signing into WhatsApp will be asked to confirm their age. It'll be interesting to see just how, or if, WhatsApp and Facebook will enforce this, considering that little information is shared on the chat...
YouTube couldn't wait to tell people just how many videos of extremism and adult entertainment it removed from its platform late last year. Yeah, talk about an odd brand of excitement. Following its announcement to clean up its community earlier this year, YouTube revealed in its new Community Guidelines quarterly report that some 8-million videos were removed from the platform between October and December last year. "The majority of these 8-million videos were mostly spam or people attempting to upload adult content -- and represent a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s total views during this time period," the company wrote. Additionally, 6.7-million...
Okay, so I'm a bit of a mad cat lady. If you ever wanted me to pay attention to something, bury that information in a cat video and send it to me. That's probably why I've been watching pet company Whiskas's Kitten Kollege YouTube series for the past 20 minutes. Uh, yes, I'm totally working. The series takes the idea that anyone (and any species) can learn anything on the internet to heart. "Adopting a tiny kitten is a magical experience, it literally takes seconds after introducing the curious little feline to your home that you realise two things: firstly, cats are...
You're probably already sick of being at work, am I right? But what if I told you that your desk is pretty damn boring too? Thankfully, I don't have to, but Instagram most certainly will. The company this week (pushing aside Facebook's woes for a moment) announced its new official account @design. Yes, that handle is probably the envy of designer influencers across the world, but so are the scenes it captures. This was a temporary workspace for the designer and artist @camillewalala, who set up her sketchbook next to a pancake breakfast while on holiday on the southern coast of...
Just like its owner Facebook, Instagram will soon allow users to download all the data they've ever uploaded to the service. "We are building a new data portability tool. You’ll soon be able to download a copy of what you’ve shared on Instagram, including your photos, videos and messages," an Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch. It's a stark departure to the social network's closed ecosystem that doesn't make it easy to download images on desktop or mobile. Even if it's your own. How to download your Facebook data (and why you should) Memeburn breaks down the steps to download all your data from Facebook....
If you're too lazy to ask a fellow human for their Instagram handle, the social network's upcoming feature is just what you need. In a similar vein to Snapchat's Snapcodes, Instagram is reportedly readying its Nametag feature that will allow users to follow friends by scanning tags with their smartphone camera. And yes, this seemingly was inspired by its yellow rival, but Nametags make sense if you're an influencer or business. They can be printed, stuck to the door of a restaurant, pasted on your enemies' back when they're not looking, or plucked onto YouTube videos or Twitter profile images. And Instagram's...
Brace yourselves if you plan to login to Facebook today, because you might be in for an uncomfortable surprise. The social network announced that it will today inform the 87-million users who were affected by the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The alert will be in the form of a message card at the top of users' news feeds. The company initially believed only 50-million Facebook users were affected by the data scandal. However, last week it boosted that figure by more than 30-million. Around 70-million of those users affected reside in the United States, a million from the Philippines, United Kingdom and...
What does WhatsApp's co-founder Brian Acton, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Playboy's CEO Cooper Hefner, and now Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak all have in common? They've all left Facebook in some capacity. Wozniak, speaking to USA Today, seemingly no longer wants to be the "product" that Facebook sells. "Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and ... Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this," he told the publication in an email this weekend. "The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back." "Apple makes its money off of...
Three people were wounded on Tuesday after a shooting broke out at YouTube's California headquarters. The shooter later committed suicide. According to a statement, the San Bruno Police Department received 911 calls "reporting gun fire at the YouTube campus located at 901 Cherry Avenue in San Bruno". Officers then arrived at the headquarters minutes later. "Arriving officers encountered numerous employees fleeing the building. Officers encountered one victim with an apparent gunshot wound to a lower extremity at the front of the building," the statement continued. A "deceased female inside with a possible self-inflicted gunshot wound" was then found. She was...
BlackBerry's back at it again. Not content with simply suing Facebook-owned WhatsApp for alleged patent infringement this year, BlackBerry is now suing Snap Inc's Snapchat for doing the same. According to BlackBerry, Snap "has used BlackBerry's intellectual property to compete with it in the mobile messaging space". These infringements are "damaging" BlackBerry's business, it notes in its complaint. Said intellectual property includes six patents -- 8,825,084; 8,326,327; 8,301,713; 8,209,634; 8,296,351; and 8,676,929 -- that it used and pioneered through BlackBerry Messenger. These cover a broad spectrum, including Snap Map and Snap Ads. Additionally, Bloomberg notes that four of those six patents were...
If you're still using Facebook Messenger, you can now send 360 degree photos and videos -- in addition to 720p video -- from the Android and iOS app. "For 360 degree photos in Messenger, simply set your phone camera to panorama and snap a photo or capture a 360 degree photo using a 360 photo app or camera. Then share it in Messenger as you would a normal photo," the company explains in an update. As the 360 media you capture isn't reliant on Messenger but your phone's default camera app, this feature might not be supported by all phones. This...
In what seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to its parent company's recent leaky-data woes, Instagram has restricted third-party developers from accessing its data pool. For users, this may sound like a welcome change, but it's a mixed bag. A report by TechCrunch suggests that the image-sharing social network reduced its API call limit -- essentially the total number of instances a third-party app or service can request information from Instagram in an hour -- from 5000 calls to just 200 calls. This means that services fundamentally requiring high update rates -- or simply services built with the original update rate in...
A few days ago, we wrote a piece about Tinder's parent company Match suing its dating app rival Bumble for patent infringement. While that particular case isn't over just yet, a new counter-case has just emerged. That's right. The plucky bee-themed dating company is now suing Match for US$400-million for "fraudulently" requesting trade secrets. According to a TechCrunch report, Match required the information -- in the midst of the company's drive to purchase Tinder's rival -- to validate a higher offer. But an offer never came, and Bumble believes the information Match requested was used to benefit it financially in the dating...
The sleeping social media giant has finally woken up. After offering users lip-service through its nightmarish past two weeks, Facebook is now physically addressing its data issues, beginning with a redesign its apps' privacy settings and the addition of a user info management section. "Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data," writes Erin Egan, the company's VP and CPO, and Ashlie Beringer, VP and deputy general counsel in a joint statement. Here's the extent of the company's latest...
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