By Kyle Brasseur2021-04-16T14:29:00+01:00
It isn’t surprising to see Facebook think it doesn’t have an ethical obligation to alert users to its latest data leak, but this time there’s an extra level of disappointment.
The social media giant has been relatively mum on the publication of a data set that contained the personal information of over 533 million of its users on a hacking forum earlier this month. Facebook released a blog post explaining how the data was scraped prior to a platform update in September 2019 and assuring the vulnerability no longer exists, but that has been the extent of its customer-facing communication thus far.
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So you want to launch an online retail business. Cool! Let s get started. First you ll need a website and inventory to make an online store. Now you need customers. They re out there, surely, somewhere on the internet.
To find them, chances are you re going to have to go through at least one of three giant tech companies: Google, Facebook or Amazon. Together those companies are valued at nearly $4 trillion. All three dominate key features of online commerce and the internet s current infrastructure.
EMarketer has called Google and Facebook a duopoly in online advertising, together accounting for more than 52% of the market. Amazon, with an expanding advertising arm, has a growing but still much smaller share. For many traditional and online retailers, advertising on Amazon may be a nonstarter, given that they see the e-commerce giant as a competitor. That leaves, to a large degree, Google and Facebook.
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(CNN) The world s biggest tech companies faced a global reckoning in 2020 as the United States, the European Union and even China took dramatic steps to curb their dominance. That pressure won t be going away in the new year.
Dozens of US states and the federal government sued Facebook and Google over claims that the companies engaged in anticompetitive behavior that tightened their grip on the online marketplace. Europe, meanwhile, recently unveiled legislation that would give regulators sweeping new power to take on those American tech companies.
The regulatory fervor has also spread to China. Officials last week announced an antitrust investigation into Jack Ma s Alibaba, and turned up the heat on the company s financial affiliate Ant Group less than two months after blocking its blockbuster stock market debut at the last minute.
9 Binary code is seen through a 3-D printed Facebook logo in this illustration. US federal and state antitrust officers filed suit against the social media giant, claiming it abused its dominant position.
Dueling antitrust lawsuits against Facebook Inc. highlighted the social-media giant s acquisitions of photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp.
But the allegations of anticompetitive practices included another through-line with potentially far-reaching implications for enterprise technology companies: data sharing.
The suits filed Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general argue Facebook leveraged its trove of user information both to entice third-party developers onto the platform and to bend them toward its will.