Archive: Author: The Management

Nearly 11 years ago, Facebook took a giant step toward becoming the global social networking behemoth that it is today. It launched “Facebook Platform,” opening itself up and inviting outside software developers to create their own inventive applications running on top of the company’s trove of user data, and letting them earn ad revenue on those apps to boot. Soon, a whole ecosystem of services and games grew up inside and around the site. For tech industry insiders, it was the moment when Facebook really started to grow up and demonstrate its potential.At the time, at techPresident, our old group blog and news site, we noticed something unusual. Among the many commercial apps showcased by Mark Zuckerberg at Platform’s launch, there...

The New York Times and The Observer of London made big waves Saturday with a front-page story adding more details to what is known about data-firm Cambridge Analytica's role in the 2016 election, revealing with the help of whistleblower and former CA employee Christopher Wylie that the company "harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network's history."That framing, by reporters Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr, led many observers to refer to what happened as a "breach" and had lawmakers in both the U.S. and the U.K. rushing to call for hearings on why Facebook hadn't told its users...