Why fake Facebook accounts can be real scary

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani on Wednesday said Zuckerberg had accepted the EU institution’s invitation to travel across the Atlantic and face lawmakers in person as soon as next week. The meeting will take place in private, the assembly’s press service said.

“Our citizens deserve a full and detailed explanation,” Tajani said in a statement posted on Twitter. “I welcome Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to appear in person before the representatives of 500 million Europeans. It is a step in the right direction towards restoring confidence.”

Ms. Dixon will soon gain vast new authority to investigate and fine Facebook, as well as an array of other technology giants with regional headquarters in Ireland. Amid increased concerns over online privacy, a sweeping new European privacy law could make her one of the world’s most consequential regulators.

She is eager to test her newfound power. But the question remains whether her tiny agency is able — or willing — to stand up to tech behemoths of Silicon Valley.

He jousted with celebrities and nobodies on social media. He staged self-conscious stunts, like appearing in a video entitled “7 Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality,” in which he posed as a Jedi and danced to “Harlem Shake” with a bunch of young conservatives. But the video just inflamed the internet. On Twitter, Mark Hamill—Luke Skywalker himself—jeered at Pai, calling him “profoundly unworthy” to wield a light­saber. Someone else quickly identified a young woman dancing next to Pai as a right-wing conspiracy theorist who had helped spread “Pizzagate,” a hoax scandal from the lunatic fringe that linked Hillary Clinton to a child-abuse ring.

“We are in charge of keeping our most vulnerable people private and protected,” said Heather Ali, who works at the hospital in nursing administration. “Now people wonder, ‘How much is my privacy protected at a hospital with that name on it?’”

Megan Brizzolara, a nurse at the hospital, said the Zuckerberg name “scares” patients.

Two of the new Gehry-designed buildings have surpassed MPK 20 as having the most expensive permits filed in Menlo Park in recent history, valued at $303M and $300M respectively. Using BuildZoom’s National Building Permit Database, we explored Facebook’s recent westward expansion in terms of costs and square footage, interesting architectural features, and other key details about the burgeoning West Campus and surrounding areas.

Facebook allows advertisers to target users it thinks are interested in subjects such as homosexuality, Islam or liberalism, despite religion, sexuality and political beliefs explicitly being marked out as sensitive information under new data protection laws.

The social network gathers information about users based on their actions on Facebook and on the wider web, and uses that data to predict on their interests. These can be mundane – football, Manhattan or dogs, for instance – or more esoteric.

The changes, which go into effect August 16th, do two main things: first, they prevent new tweets from streaming into an app in real time; and second, they prevent and delay some push notifications. Neither of these are going to break Twitter apps completely, but they could be very annoying depending on how and where you use it. 

It didn’t really take off on Twitter until it began to be used for object labeling — the meme version of editorial cartooning, in which objects become loudly signposted metaphors for other things. (Think about the stock photo of the guy holding hands with his girlfriend, looking over his shoulder to ogle another woman.)

Facebook is also adding an Audio option in the Facebook Camera to share voice messages as Voice Posts. Voice recordings are not only fast and intimate, they also get around the need to install native-language keyboards, and they don’t require written proficiency in a language people can more easily speak.

Many of the law’s broad principles, though they avoid references to specific technologies, are nevertheless based on already outdated assumptions about technology. “I think it’s very clear that they imagined some company that has your data physically stored somewhere, and you have the right to take it out,” a law professor told me of the G.D.P.R.’s approach to data portability. But in the era of big data and cloud services, data rarely exists in only one place.

What the regulation really means is likely to be decided in European courts, which is sure to be a drawn-out and confusing process.

The recent backlash has brought up real issues that deserve focus. And just as they did then in 2010, leaders at Facebook (and especially Mark) have processed this criticism with employees openly and have worked rapidly to put plans in action. I have great respect for and faith in those leaders. This time around, however, with Facebook’s organization around 20 times larger, I felt powerless to help.

I stepped back to realize that 2018’s Facebook had become a very different place to work than 2008’s Facebook. The ambition of the new efforts and the level of quality of the products and tools at Facebook today is incredible. That has made it an amazing place to be a deep expert in so many roles. But I thrive more in broader, multidisciplinary roles where I can be scrappy and build brand new things.

In an all hands meeting shortly after I joined in 2008, Sheryl Sandberg gave a speech about priorities that I’ll never forget. She said “most people come to work every day and look for the low-hanging fruit, but we come to work and step over all the fruit on the floor to look for the juiciest ones.” Recently, that’s felt less true and I realized how much I really missed 2008’s Facebook.