Updated on December 10, 2021
Social media has made headlines all this week… unfortunately, it’s not for the most flattering reasons. Here’s some of the goings-on with some major social networks.
Facebook: Passwords stored in plain text
The latest security breach from Facebook is about as embarrassing as all of the others. Or not so latest: a report by Kreb on Security states that since 2012, Facebook’s been storing passwords for hundreds of millions of users in plain text. Said passwords were searchable internally by up to 20,000 company employees. Facebook states that they’ll notify affected users. However, since there’s (supposedly) no signs of abuse or passwords leaking outside of the company, they won’t require users to change passwords.
Still, it’s probably a good idea for users to update their Facebook passwords, anyway (and turn on two-factor authentication, if it’s not on already). Though admittedly, that doesn’t do much about the large number of other problems with Facebook. It’s also on top of the previous week’s efforts to deal with blocking re-uploading attempts of video of last week’s horrifying Christchurch, New Zealand mass shooting. (An appalling 1.5 million such uploads, at that.)
Tumblr: Purging adult content leads to a sizable drop in traffic
Last December, Tumblr decided to eliminate all of its adult material, albeit in a heavy-handed fashion. As others have predicted, it’s resulted in a big drop of traffic—by 29% from December to February. See the infographic below.
Again, this was pretty predictable. However, it’s not clear as to where former Tumblr users are jumping ship. While I made a few suggestions in a previous post (WordPress.com, Twitter, etc.) there’s no completely similar service to Tumblr.
Image by Denys Vitali from Pixabay
