Parmy Olson

Perhaps the saying, “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” holds true for controversial technology companies. New York-based Clearview AI has been criticized by privacy advocates for years because of the way it has scraped billions of images from social-media networks to build a search…

Kremlin propaganda isn’t just piped into Russia’s brains via television. On TikTok, which suspended all new video uploads from Russia this week, some “influencers” managed to stand out in the sea of dancing and cooking clips by supporting President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The reach of…

The free and open World Wide Web has for years been moving toward becoming a patchwork of information siloes, divided by national borders. That shift towards a so-called splinternet(1)accelerated over the weekend, when Russian officials announced they were limiting access to Facebook products,…

When Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse last year, he conjured an image of harmonious social connections in an immersive virtual world. But his company’s first iterations of the space have not been very harmonious. Several women have reported incidents of harassment, including a beta tester…

Facebook has always been good at telling a story. After a whistle-blower revealed astonishing harm caused by the company’s products to the mental health of teens and others across the world, the company changed its name and got everyone talking about the metaverse instead. Now Mark Zuckerberg has…

Browsing the internet has never really been free. Each time you visit a website, a silent auction for your eyeballs is conducted to show you an ad that effectively makes you pay with your personal information. Location, birthday, browsing data and more are broadcast to hundreds of vendors within a…

Parmy Olson: With the plunge in Meta Platforms Inc.’s stock this week, shareholders are focusing scrutiny on Facebook’s decision to re-brand itself and stake its future on the metaverse: a 3D, immersive world where we talk and do things as avatars. Second Life had all this when it launched…

Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., the world’s biggest digital advertising platforms, once again raked in astonishing amounts of money in 2021. “So what else is new?” you’re probably wondering. Almost every year for the past decade, the companies also known as Google and Facebook set profit…

Verifying your identity used to be so simple. You’d show a picture on your driver’s license or passport and these were two objects that lived in your pocket or a drawer at home. Today, you can be identified by an array of digital representations of your face via the likes of Apple Inc., Microsoft…

Despite all the fanfare around Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to create a cryptocurrency that was predicted to bring in “billions” in new revenue, the project has petered out with barely whimper. Meta Platforms Inc., the company formerly known as Facebook, agreed to sell assets tied to the project born in…