SAN FRANCISCO, United States - Facebook on Wednesday rolled out its Messenger Kids application to 70 new countries, saying it can help children deal with the challenges of distance learning and isolation during the virus lockdowns.
The app, which is aimed at children under 13, will also be adding a "supervised friending" feature enabling parents to approve new connections, starting in the United States and gradually rolling out to other countries.
"With schools closed and people physically distancing, parents are turning to technology more than ever to help their kids connect with friends and family," Facebook's global head of safety Antigone Davis said in a blog post.
"Messenger Kids is a video chat and messaging app that helps kids connect with friends and family in a fun, parent-controlled space. Today, we're starting to roll out Messenger Kids to more countries and we’re adding new choices for parents to connect kids with friends."
Messenger Kids was launched in the United States in 2017 and expanded later to Canada and a handful of other countries, aiming at children too young for a Facebook account.
With the changes announced Wednesday, kids will be able to connect in groups to help facilitate learning, under parental supervision.
Parents in the US, Canada and Latin America can also allow their children to make their name and profile photo visible as part of the move to get more friends.
Kids will be able to initiate their own friend requests. Up to now these had to be initiated by the parents.
"Parents have told us they want to be able to give their kids more independence in managing their contact list while still maintaining parental supervision," Davis said.
"Previously, it was up to parents to invite and approve every contact for their child. Now with supervised friending, parents can choose to allow their kids to also accept, reject, add or remove contacts, while maintaining the ability to override any new contact approvals."
Some privacy activists have argued the app could be harmful to children by drawing them into online activity and potentially gathering data on them.
Facebook has argued that the app helps parents supervise their youngsters who would be using its platform without safeguards.
The new countries are in various regions of the world and include Afghanistan, Costa Rica, Indonesia and Tuvalu. No European countries are on the list.
Agence France-Presse
Facebook Inc on Thursday rolled out the desktop version of its Messenger app for Apple's Mac and Microsoft's Windows to make video chats available on computer screens for Facebook users.
The move comes as use of videoconferencing apps like Zoom have soared, with corporate offices, school districts, organizations and millions across the world working from home after lockdowns were enforced to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Facebook had announced the plan for the desktop version last year, while unveiling steps to refashion itself into a private messaging company.
The social network on Thursday noted that it saw more than a 100% jump in people using their desktop browser for audio and video calling on Messenger over the past month.
-Reuters-
SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook on Monday began enlisting outside developers to create ways its Messenger service can help health organizations battling the novel coronavirus.
The social network also invited software savants to take part in an online "hackathon" aimed at creating ways to use Messenger to ease social-distancing and deliver accurate information about the pandemic, according to Messenger vice president Stan Chudnovsky in a blog post.
He unveiled a global program intended to connect government health organizations and UN agencies with developers who can create ways to use Messenger share accurate information and speed up responses to people's questions.
Software makers, for example, could help agencies automate answering common questions, to allow staff to tackle more challenging tasks.
Developers can also help organizations use software to quickly distribute updated information.
UNICEF and Pakistan's Ministry of National Health already use Messenger to keep people posted about COVID-19, according to the Facebook-owned messaging platform.
Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp recently launched a free World Health Organization alert designed to answer questions about the coronavirus and debunk "coronavirus myths."
The service, launching in English, is to expand in coming weeks to include Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.
WhatsApp last week launched a Coronavirus Information Hub in partnership with WHO and United Nations organizations.
WhatsApp, which claims more than a billion users, issued a $1 million grant to an International Fact Checking Network alliance devoted to reporting on coronavirus rumors spreading on messaging services.
"We think the most important step WhatsApp can take is to help connect people directly with public health officials providing crucial updates about coronavirus," spokesman Carl Woog told AFP.
Concerns have been raised about WhatsApp and other messaging services being used to spread bogus information about coronavirus.
WhatsApp software prevents users from blasting messages to massive numbers of people at once, which tends to be a spam tactic.
The service also labels forwarded or chain messages to show people they did not come directly from a friend or family member.
Agence France-Presse
(Reuters) - Twitter confirmed on Friday that the official Twitter accounts of social media giant Facebook Inc and its Messenger platform were hacked.
A Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the accounts were hacked through a third-party platform.
“As soon as we were made aware of the issue, we locked the compromised accounts and are working closely with our partners at Facebook to restore them,” the Twitter spokesperson said.
Seperately, Facebook also confirmed that some of its official social media accounts were hacked on Friday.
“Some of our corporate social accounts were briefly hacked but we have secured and restored access,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said.
The account of Twitter Inc Chief Executive Jack Dorsey was hacked in August, allowing an unauthorized person to send public tweets including racial slurs and curse words to his 4 million followers before Twitter secured the account.
Facebook Inc's social networking site is inaccessible to some users across the world on Sunday, according to Downdetector.com, a website which monitors outages.
Technology website The Verge reported that Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp were also inaccessible to many users around the world.
Other news outlets have also reported on the outage.
Downdetector.com showed that there are more than 9000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook.
Downdetector.com's live outage map showed that the issues cropped up in Europe, the East Coast of the United States, and Southeast Asia including the Philippines.
Facebook had experienced one of its longest outages in March, when some users around the globe faced trouble accessing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for over 24 hours.
- With a report from Reuters
source: news.abs-cbn.com
SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook on Thursday announced it had restructured its team devoted to products or features designed to increase the social network's appeal to younger generations.
Nascent projects such as a "LOL" platform for funny memes were taken off the board at the "youth team," which shifted focus to more promising products such as a Messenger Kids app launched more than a year ago, according to the leading social network.
"The Youth team has restructured in order to match top business priorities, including increasing our investment in Messenger Kids," Facebook said in response to an AFP inquiry.
Facebook in December 2017 introduced a version of its Messenger application designed to let young children connect with others under parental supervision. No in-app purchases are allowed.
The social media giant said at the time that it created the app, available in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru and Thailand, because many children were going online without safeguards.
"We found that there was a need for a video chat and messaging app that lets kids connect with the people they love while putting parents in complete control," product management lead Jennifer Billock said in a blog post marking the app's one year anniversary.
"We conducted parent roundtables in each country and have continued gathering feedback from parents and outside experts."
Facebook's rules require that children be at least 13 to create an account, but many are believed to get around the restrictions.
California-based Facebook has been working to attract and keep young internet users being lured away from the social network by apps such as photo- and video-oriented Snapchat.
Facebook said the reorganization of the team was not related to recent controversy regarding a research app that paid users, including teens, to track their smartphone activity as part of an effort to glean more data that could help the social network's competition efforts.
The youth team was not involved with the research project nor did it use any of the data collected, according to Facebook.
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MANILA - After gradient options, Facebook has begun public testing its dark mode feature for the Messenger app in certain countries.
Twitter user Jane Wong, who became known for uncovering upcoming tech features by unpacking them, broke the news on New Year's Day.
Wong earlier said the feature was ready to roll out back in November.
In a tweet on Nov. 17, Messenger confirmed that the dark mode feature will be made available after the new version of the app has been rolled out globally.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook on Tuesday announced an overhaul of its Messenger smartphone app in an effort to simplify the service for its 1.3 billion monthly global users.
The social network began rolling out a redesigned version featuring three tabs instead of nine, saying it was "going back to its roots" seven years after the standalone app's launch.
"We build one feature after another; they're piling up," Messenger chief Stan Chudnovsky said of the service, which has grown from a simple messaging app to one that lets users make video calls, send money and more.
The updated tabs allow users to navigate between their conversations under "Chats," stories and contacts at "People," and "Discovery," which is devoted to games and exchanges with businesses.
Facebook has positioned Messenger as a tool for businesses to efficiently handle customer questions or concerns.
Talking to customers via the app is free -- but businesses can also pay for Facebook ads that let customers start a conversation or visit their page with one click.
Messenger is part of Facebook's effort to expand outside the social network -- particularly when it comes to staying relevant to mobile lifestyles and younger people, who have been moving away from the service.
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SAN FRANCISCO - The US government is trying to force Facebook Inc to break the encryption in its popular Messenger app so law enforcement may listen to a suspect's voice conversations in a criminal probe, 3 people briefed on the case said, resurrecting the issue of whether companies can be compelled to alter their products to enable surveillance.
The previously unreported case in a federal court in California is proceeding under seal, so no filings are publicly available, but the 3 people told Reuters that Facebook is contesting the US Department of Justice's demand.
The judge in the Messenger case heard arguments on Tuesday on a government motion to hold Facebook in contempt of court for refusing to carry out the surveillance request, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Facebook and the Department of Justice declined to comment.
The Messenger issue arose in Fresno, California, as part of an investigation of the MS-13 gang, one of the people said.
US President Donald Trump frequently uses the gang, which is active in the United States and Central America, as a symbol of lax US immigration policy and a reason to attack so-called "sanctuary" laws preventing police from detaining people solely to enforce immigration law.
Trump called members of the gang "animals" this year when the Sheriff of Fresno County complained that California laws limited her cooperation with federal immigration enforcement targeting gang members.
The potential impact of the judge's coming ruling is unclear. If the government prevails in the Facebook Messenger case, it could make similar arguments to force companies to rewrite other popular encrypted services such as Signal and Facebook's billion-user WhatsApp, which include both voice and text functions, some legal experts said.
Law enforcement agencies forcing technology providers to rewrite software to capture and hand over data that is no longer encrypted would have major implications for the companies which see themselves as defenders of individual privacy while under pressure from police and lawmakers.
Similar issues came into play during a legal fight in 2016 between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Apple Inc over access to an iPhone owned by a slain sympathizer of Islamic State in San Bernardino, California, who had murdered county employees.
WIRETAP OF VOICE CONVERSATIONS
In the Apple case the company argued that the government could not compel it to create software to breach the phone without violating the company's First Amendment speech and expression rights. The government dropped the litigation after investigators got into the phone with a contractor's help.
Unlike the San Bernardino case, where the FBI wanted to crack one iPhone in its possession, prosecutors are seeking a wiretap of ongoing voice conversations by one person on Facebook Messenger.
Facebook is arguing in court that Messenger voice calls are encrypted end-to-end, meaning that only the 2 parties have access to the conversation, 2 of the people briefed on the case said.
Ordinary Facebook text messages, Alphabet Inc's Gmail, and other services are decrypted by the service providers during transit for targeted advertising or other reasons, making them available for court-ordered interception.
End-to-end encrypted communications, by contrast, go directly from one user to another user without revealing anything intelligible to providers.
Facebook says it can only comply with the government's request if it rewrites the code relied upon by all its users to remove encryption or hacks the government's current target, according to the sources.
Legal experts differed about whether the government would likely be able to force Facebook to comply.
Stephen Larson, a former judge and federal prosecutor who represented San Bernardino victims, said the government must meet a high legal standard when seeking to obtain phone conversations, including showing there was no other way to obtain the evidence.
Still, the US Constitution allows for reasonable searches, Larson said, and if those standards are met, then companies should not be able to stand in the way.
A federal appeals court in Washington DC ruled in 2006 that the law forcing telephone companies to enable police eavesdropping also applies to some large providers of Voice over Internet Protocol, including cable and other broadband carriers servicing homes. VoIP enables voice calls online rather than by traditional circuit transmission.
However, in cases of chat, gaming, or other internet services that are not tightly integrated with existing phone infrastructure, such as Google Hangouts, Signal and Facebook Messenger, federal regulators have not attempted to extend the eavesdropping law to cover them, said Al Gidari, a director of privacy at Stanford University Law School's Center for Internet and Society.
"A messaging platform is excluded," maintains Gidari, who is not involved in the Fresno case.
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