Business, Spoken

Facebook tells users that giving the company their mobile phone number will help keep their account secure. Until a few weeks ago, however, the social network’s self-service ad-targeting tools could be massaged into revealing a Facebook user’s cellphone number from their email address. The same flaw made it possible to collect phone numbers for Facebook users who had visited a particular webpage. Facebook fixed the problems on Dec.

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It’s difficult to remember now, but there was a moment in early 2016 when many in the tech industry believed chatbots---automated text-based virtual assistants---would be the next big platform. Messaging app Kik staked its company’s future on bots and “chatvertising.” Startup studio Betaworks launched an accelerator program called Botcamp. And at its 2016 F8 conference, Facebook pitched bots to developers as the best way to connect with 900 million Messenger users.

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Since 2009, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly announced a personal improvement challenge in January, a sort of New Year's resolution and Oprah’s Book Club rolled into one. Learn Mandarin. Run 365 miles. Kill your own meat. But this year, Zuckerberg pledged to spend 2018 "fixing" big problems at Facebook.

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Last weekend, 150 of tech’s most gifted engineers traveled to an Arizona resort to spend three days at an event that, despite having never happened before, is called Reunion. The group ranged from the semi-famous, like PayPal founder Max Levchin and Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott, to the spectacularly promising, like Stanford junior Nancy Xu. There were a few panels, some company presentations, and a smattering of horseback rides and hikes in the afternoons.

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Internet giants Amazon, Facebook, and Google plan to throw their collective weight behind efforts to save net neutrality. The Internet Association, the industry's primary lobbying organization, announced Friday that it plans to join lawsuits aimed at halting the Federal Communications Commission's December action to repeal Obama-era net neutrality rules. Those rules banned internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or otherwise discriminating against legal content online.

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Technology companies with unprecedented power to sway consumers and move markets have done the unthinkable: They’ve made trust-busting sound like a good idea again. The concentration of wealth and influence among tech giants has been building for years---90 percent of new online-ad dollars went to either Google or Facebook in 2016; Amazon is by far the largest online retailer, the third-largest streaming media company, and largest cloud-computing provider.

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In the high-stakes world of venture-backed startups, not growing is the same as dying. Historically, stalled companies sought a sympathetic acquirer or quietly shut down. Now, startups have a new potential lifeline: They pivot to blockchain. Kik kicked things off in September. The messaging app, which has struggled under competition from Facebook and Instagram, created its own cryptocurrency called Kin, which can be used to buy and sell things via the Kik app today, and other apps in the future.

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“An app that converts your daily change into bail money to free black people.” That’s what Kortney Ryan Ziegler, a social engineer with a PhD in African-American studies, tweeted in July. https://twitter.com/fakerapper/status/889197985678073856The response was instantaneous—and overwhelming. Nearly 200 people replied with offers to help. That was the start of Appolition, which converts users’ spare change into bail money.

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The mood around tech is dark these days. Social networks are a cesspool of harassment and lies. On-demand firms are producing a bleak economy of gig labor. AI learns to be racist. Is there anyplace where the tech news is radiant with old-fashioned optimism? Where good cheer abounds? Why, yes, there is: clean energy. It is, in effect, the new Silicon Valley—filled with giddy, breathtaking ingenuity and flat-out good news.

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