Snap said the economy had worsened faster than expected in the last month and the social media company slashed its quarterly forecast, triggering an after-hours sell-off.
Since late April, “the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated further and faster than anticipated. As a result, we believe it is likely that we will report revenue and adjusted EBITDA below the low end of our Q2 2022 guidance range,” the company said in a US securities filing.
Shares of Snap fell 31 percent, Alphabet dropped 3.6 percent, and Amazon dropped 2.2 percent. Nasdaq futures also fell, with traders blaming Snap.
US stocks had ended higher on Monday, led by gains from banks and tech, but the rise follows Wall Street’s longest streak of weekly declines since the dotcom bust more than 20 years ago and many investors remain on edge.
Snap Chief Executive Evan Spiegel told employees in a memo seen by Reuters that the company will slow hiring for this year and laid out a broad slate of problems.
“Like many companies, we continue to face rising inflation and interest rates, supply chain shortages and labor disruptions, platform policy changes, the impact of the war in Ukraine, and more,” he wrote.
Last month, Snap forecast second-quarter revenue growth of 20 percent to 25 percent over the previous year.
The news follows statements by companies including Uber and Facebook-owner Meta earlier this month that they would rein in costs and hiring.
In the memo, Spiegel said Snap would evaluate the rest of this year’s budget and “leaders have been asked to review spending to find additional cost savings.”
Some planned hiring will be pushed into next year, though the company still expects to hire more than 500 people by the end of this year, he said.
Some of the top 100,000 websites are found to be collecting data from their online forms even before you hit the Submit button, a study conducted by researchers has revealed. In some cases, many of these top-visited websites were even collecting password data of their visitors, without user consent. A large number of the websites collecting personal data including email addresses of their users without their prior permission appear to have this behaviour due to third-party trackers that are integrated for advertising and marketing purposes.
Conducted by researchers from Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne, the study is based on a system that enabled crawling and analysis of the top 100,000 websites from two different locations — European Union and the US. It shows that of the total number of websites analysed, as many as 1,844 websites captured data including email addresses of visitors from the EU region without their consent. In the case of a visitor coming from the US, that number increases to 2,950 websites, per the research.
In most cases, the trackers were of companies including Meta and TikTok that were getting user data from the top websites analysed. However, the researchers also noticed 41 previously unknown tracker domains that were found to be involved in capturing user data from the top websites before the users hit the Submit button.
While conducting the study, the researchers notably avoided considering cases in which websites might have legitimate reasons for collecting email addresses of users before submission. For instance, in some cases, websites check whether an email or username is already available in the database.
Nevertheless, the researchers discovered many of the popular websites where online trackers were capturing email addresses before the user gives their consent.
In the US, the top-ten websites where email addresses were found to be leaked to trackers include USAToday, Business Insider, Fox News, Time, and Trello, while in the EU, the list includes Independent, Shopify, Newsweek, and Marriott.
The researchers also found 52 websites in which third parties including Russia’s Yandex were incidentally collecting passwords before submission. Yandex rolled out a fix to prevent password collection when reached out by the researcher group.
“Based on our findings, users should assume that the personal information they enter into Web forms may be collected by trackers—even if the form is never submitted,” the researchers said in an 18-page paper detailing their study. “Considering its scale, intrusiveness and unintended side-effects, the privacy problem we investigate deserves more attention from browser vendors, privacy tool developers, and data protection agencies.”
Alongside regular capturing of email addresses, the researchers noticed that trackers of Meta and TikTok in some cases were collecting hashed personal information from Web forms. This is due to an “advanced matching” feature that is found to be responsible for capturing hashed user data including email addresses before submission.
“We believe the leaks are due to Facebook’s script interpreting clicks on irrelevant buttons as ‘submit button clicked’ events,” the researchers said.
Gadgets 360 has reached out to both Meta and TikTok for clarity on the study and will update this article when the companies respond.
Apple and other tech giants have started blocking third-party cookies and trackers to help reduce online tracking of users. However, the idea to track online visitors through email addresses could help marketers have an effective solution in place despite the ongoing restrictions.
The researchers also noted in their co-authored paper that email addresses work as an “ideal identifier” and help fill the gap for online trackers as they can allow tracking across platforms and on a longer term compared with other such parameters.
The findings from the research will be presented in detail at the Usenix security conference in August.
Our updates on social media gives world an insight into our personality in general and our needs and perspectives on those issues in particular. But what if there’s also a way to judge how we were feeling exactly at the time we shared an image, a video or any other post. To be able to understand this, researchers at the Open University of Catalonia in Spain have developed an algorithm that they claim can identify people who are unhappy by screening the posts they share on social media. The researchers believe this tool could be useful in diagnosing possible communication problems and mental health.
The team worked on this deep learning model for two years. The researchers relied on American psychiatrist William Glasser’s Choice Theory, which describes five basic needs central to all human behaviour — survival, power, freedom, belonging and fun. They say these needs have an influence on the images we choose to upload on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. The study also revealed that Spanish-speaking users were more likely to mention relationship problems on social media when they feel depressed than English-speaking users.
“How we present ourselves on social media can provide useful information about behaviours, personalities, perspectives, motives and needs,” Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi, who led this study, said in a statement.
Dehshibi and his team of researchers analysed 86 Instagram profiles, in both Spanish and Persian, for the study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. They believe that their research can help improve preventive measures, ranging from identification to improved treatment when a person has been diagnosed with a mental health disorder.
But how does the algorithm work? Dehshibi explains this by citing an example of a cyclist riding up a mountain. Once at the top, whether the person chooses to share a selfie or a group photo can help understand the person’s mental state. If the person chooses a selfie, it’s perceived as a need for power. If they choose the other option, it is concluded that the person is looking for more than just fun, but also a way to satisfy their need for belonging.
Four Democratic lawmakers on Thursday asked the CEOs of YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook owner Meta to archive content that could be used as evidence of suspected Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
Ukraine and the West say Russian troops have committed war crimes in its 11-week invasion of its neighbor, in which thousands of civilians have been killed. Russia denies the allegations and says it does not target civilians.
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the lawmakers, including the leaders of the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees, Carolyn Maloney, and Gregory Meeks, encouraged the company to preserve content posted on its sites.
That content “could potentially be used as evidence as the US government and international human rights and accountability monitors investigate Russian war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other atrocities in Ukraine,” the letter said.
The letters were also signed by two subcommittee chairmen, William Keating, and Stephen Lynch.
The UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution on Thursday to establish an investigation into possible war crimes by Russian troops in places near the capital Kyiv and beyond, a move that Russia said amounted to political score-settling.
Meanwhile, Facebook parent Meta Platforms said on Wednesday it has withdrawn a request for policy guidance from its Oversight Board about the content moderation of posts related to Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine.
“This decision was not made lightly — the PAO (policy advisory opinion) was withdrawn due to ongoing safety and security concerns,” the company said in a blog post.
The board, which can make binding decisions on specific thorny content moderation appeals and give policy recommendations, said it was “disappointed” by the decision.
A Meta spokesman declined to give more information about the policies on which it was seeking guidance or about the specific concerns.
Russia banned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram in March, finding Meta guilty of “extremist activity” amid Moscow’s crackdown on social media during its invasion of Ukraine. Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp is not affected by the ban. Russia has also throttled Twitter by slowing its service.
US-based technology industry body ITI, having global tech firms such as Google, Facebook, IBM and Cisco as its members, has sought a revision in the Indian government’s directive on reporting of cyber security breach incidents. ITI said that the provisions under the new mandate may adversely impact organisations and undermine cybersecurity in the country.
ITI country manager for India Kumar Deep, in a letter to CERT-In chief Sanjay Bahl dated May 5, asked for a wider stakeholder consultation with the industry before finalising on the directive.
“The directive has the potential to improve India’s cybersecurity posture if appropriately developed and implemented, however, certain provisions in the bill, including counterproductive incident reporting requirements, may negatively impact Indian and global enterprises and undermine cybersecurity,” Deep said.
Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) on April 28 issued a directive asking all government and private agencies, including internet service providers, social media platforms and data centres, to mandatorily report cybersecurity breach incidents to it within six hours of noticing them.
The new circular issued by the CERT-In mandates all service providers, intermediaries, data centres, corporates and government organisations to mandatorily enable logs of all their ICT (Information and Communication Technology) systems and maintain them securely for a rolling period of 180 days and the same shall be maintained within the Indian jurisdiction.
ITI has raised concerns over the mandatory reporting of breach incidents within six hours of noticing, to enable logs of all ICT systems and maintain them within Indian jurisdiction for 180 days, the overbroad definition of reportable incidents and the requirement that companies connect to the servers of Indian government entities.
Deep, in the letter, said that the organisations must be given 72 hours to report an incident in line with global best practices and not just six hours.
ITI said that the government’s mandate to enable logs of all covered entities’ information and communications technology systems, maintain logs “securely for a rolling period of 180 days” within India and make them available to the Indian government upon request is not a best practice.
“It would make such repositories of logged information a target for global threat actors, in addition to requiring significant resources (both human and technical) to implement,” Deep said.
ITI also raised concern on the requirement that “all service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and government organisations shall connect to the NTP servers of Indian labs and other entities for synchronisation of all their ICT systems clocks”.
The global body said that the provisions could negatively affect companies’ security operations as well as the functionality of their systems, networks and applications.
ITI said that the government’s current definition of reportable incident to include activities such as probing and scanning is far too broad given probes and scans are everyday occurrences.
“It would not be useful for companies or CERT-In to spend time gathering, transmitting, receiving and storing such a large volume of insignificant information that arguably will not be followed up on,” Deep said.
ITI has asked the government to defer timeline for implementation of the new directive and launch a wider consultation with all stakeholders for its effective implementation.
ITI demanded CERT-In to “revise the directive to address the concerning provisions with regard to incident reporting obligations, including related to the reporting timeline, scope of covered incidents and logging data localisation requirements”.
Social media platform Facebook (Now Meta) on Thursday filed its response in the Delhi High Court on the petition related to the suspension of social media accounts.
Meta said that it is a private entity and does not discharge public function and therefore the jurisdiction of the High Court cannot be invoked against it. Meta opposed the petition and sought its dismissal without going into the merit of it.
An affidavit filed on behalf of Meta stated that the petitioner improperly sought to invoke this court’s jurisdiction against it.
The affidavit filed in the matter of Wokeflix said that Meta is not obligated to carry out a public duty and the Government does not control the management and day-to-day functioning of it.
It was also stated that the petitioner’s Instagram account was reactivated within 72 hours of being disabled. Meta provided with an opportunity to appeal the alleged actions taken against their account as they received a notice to appeal within 30 days. The opportunity before the action taken, as claimed by the petitioner, is contrary to law, which only requires intermediaries to provide an opportunity to appeal after the action has been taken, according to Rule 4 (8) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021.
The High Court was hearing the petitions moved by Dimple Kaul, Suyash Deep Rai, Jasdeep Munjal, Wokeflix, Rachit Kaushik and Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde. The petitioners have challenged the actions of suspension of their accounts by social media giants including Twitter, YouTube and others.
The petitioner called the action arbitrary and against the law and the Constitution. Their grievance is that their accounts were suspended without affording an opportunity for a hearing.
Instagram has started forcing users to enter their date of birth before being allowed to use the app. The change comes over eight months after Instagram announced its plans to make age verification mandatory on its platform and started prompting users to fill in their birthday details. The prime purpose of the update is to restrict access for kids below the age of 13. Instagram will also be able to use the given date of birth to offer better targeted ads to users.
To obtain the date of birth, Instagram is showing a screen before allowing access to its content. It asks users to enter their date of birth and has no option to bypass.
“Before you can continue using Instagram, you need to provide your birthday, even if this account is for something like a business or pet,” the screen prompt reads. “This helps us protect younger people in our community. We’ll also use your birthday to help personalise your experience, including ads. It won’t be part of your public profile.”
Several users who have not yet provided their date of birth on Instagram have started receiving the new prompt. A number of them have taken to Twitter and complained about Instagram’s move to forcefully ask for their birth date.
So now Instagram/Meta forces you to add your birthday not only to protect younger ones but also to include *MORE* ads to your feed… 🙄 pic.twitter.com/yoQXaBVp0b
Instagram initially started asking for age verification as an optional feature in 2019. The platform last year made it mandatory to provide date of birth details and announced the roll out of prompts to let users fill in the information in the midst of looking at the photos and videos in their feed or uploading a new content for their followers. However, up until now, the Instagram app was accessible to users who did not provide their details and skipped the earlier prompts.
Gadgets 360 has reached out to Instagram for a comment on the update and will update this article when the platform responds.
Some young users are, of course, likely to be able to bypass restrictions by giving their fake birth date details. However, Instagram — and Facebook — both have an artificial intelligence (AI) backed system in place to detect accurate age of its users.
“We look at things like people wishing you a happy birthday and the age written in those messages, for example, ‘Happy 21st Bday!’ or ‘Happy Quinceañera.’ We also look at the age you shared with us on Facebook and apply it to our other apps where you have linked your accounts and vice versa — so if you share your birthday with us on Facebook, we’ll use the same for your linked account on Instagram,” the social networking giant writes on its site to explain its birthday detection technology.
Last year, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta was found to be working on a kids-focussed version of the Instagram app that could be called Instagram for Kids. It was a result of generating growing interest from young users and facing strong criticism from government bodies including the US Congress for increasing Instagram’s use among kids. Advocacy groups and authorities including the US State Attorneys General urged the company to drop its plans. As a result of the outrage, it finally paused the development of the app in September.
Nevertheless, Meta has not yet completely scrapped its plans for developing Instagram for Kids — though it was urged to do so by various religious leaders in February.
The plan with restricting access for kids through the latest development could eventually help Instagram to redirect its young audience to the new app that we may see in the coming future. Meta would also be able to generate more revenue by serving targeted ads after getting the date of birth of its users.
TikTok has surpassed Instagram and become the world’s top downloaded app in the first quarter of 2022, according to a report by app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The short-video app, which is banned in India, managed to continue to be one of the top-five top downloaded apps worldwide. However, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — retained its dominance in the app market globally, with Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp as the three top downloaded apps worldwide after TikTok.
Sensor Tower reports that no app has had more downloads than TikTok since the start of 2018. Since the beginning of 2022, the app has been downloaded more than 175 million times, according to the report.
TikTok was the top app worldwide in Q1 2022 Photo Credit: Sensor Tower
TikTok surpassed 70 million downloads on the App Store worldwide for the third time in the first quarter. It was driven by 11 percent quarter-over-quarter growth in Asia. CapCut, a video editing app from TikTok’s publisher ByteDance, also had the last quarter as its best to date with more than 30 million downloads. It has ranked among the top 10 App Store apps each of the past five quarters, Sensor Tower said in its 75-page report.
Alongside the worldwide growth, TikTok has emerged as the top downloaded app on both the App Store and Google Play in the US and on Google Play in Europe. The ban in India also didn’t impact much in Asia as TikTok continued to be the top-downloaded app on the App Store in the region. It also moved to the third top downloaded app position on Google Play from the fourth one in the quarter earlier.
However, on Google Play worldwide, Instagram and Facebook managed to continue to fight TikTok and retain their leadership on the top-two positions.
In addition to TikTok, YouTube emerged as one of the top-two apps on the US App Store each quarter since the first quarter of 2021, per the report.
Sensor Tower said that while TikTok has surpassed 10 million downloads each of the past nine quarters, YouTube has overtaken this threshold for eight straight quarters.
But nonetheless, TikTok continued to gain momentum in the US. Sensor Tower noted that it was the top app on Google Play for the third straight quarter, with installs up 19 percent year-on-year in the first quarter.
The ongoing trend of connecting people over virtual calls — despite the revival of physical meetings — has apparently helped Zoom to grow in the market in which entertainment-focussed apps including TikTok and Facebook parent Meta are writing new growth stories.
Sensor Tower said that Zoom had positive quarter-on-quarter growth for the first time in a year by reaching the number six position on Google Play in the US with more than three million downloads. It was the top app on Google Play as recently as the first quarter of 2021, the report said.
Apps including Telegram and WhatsApp have a tough fight in Europe. While WhatsApp managed to take the second position in the list of top downloaded apps in the continent, Telegram also had its second-best quarter in the region in the first quarter of 2022, trailing the nearly 28 million installs it had in the same quarter of 2021, according to Sensor Tower.
WhatsApp was also the top app particularly on the App Store in Europe for the seventh straight quarter in the first quarter. Sensor Tower said that it was also WhatsApp’s best first quarter of the year since 2018.
In Asia, Instagram continued to come as the top app for the third straight quarter in the first quarter, followed by Facebook. Instagram was also the top app in India where it accounted for more than 60 percent of Instagram’s installs in the country, Sensor Tower said.
Instagram was also the top app on Google Play in Asia — ahead of Facebook and Shopee. Sensor Tower noted that the photo-sharing app accounted for 29 percent of Meta’s Google Play installs in Asia in the first quarter, up from 26 percent in the same quarter last year and 18 percent in the same quarter of 2020.
Shopping apps are also seen getting bigger in Asia — at least on Google Play. Sensor Tower said that shopping app installs on Google Play in Asia grew 63 percent year-on-year in the first quarter. Top apps include Shopee, Meesho, and Flipkart’s Shopsy.
On the App Store, Subway Surfers, Wordle, and Coloring Match were the top-three games worldwide in the last quarter. Garena Free Fire, Subway Surfers, and Merge Master were, however, the top-three games worldwide on Google Play.
Wordle — which is named after New York Times’ word game Wordle — was also the top game in the US, with more than nine million downloads. It was also the top game on the App Store in the country and had the top US App Store downloads since Among Us in the fourth quarter of 2020. Wordus and Word Guess were the other two games with Wordle-style gameplay that ranked among the top 20 games in the country, the report mentioned.
However, Sensor Tower said Roblox managed to continue ranking among the top-five games each quarter since the fourth quarter of 2020. In Asia, the list of top-three games in the first quarter was the same as the previous quarter, with Garena Fire Fire leading the chart, followed by Ludo King and Subway Surfers.
“Garena Free Fire and Ludo King have been in a tight race since the start of 2019, with Garena Free Fire’s 468 million installs edging Ludo King’s 461 million since that time,” Sensor Tower said.
PUBG Mobile also returned to the top-five list in Asia in the last quarter. It took the top spot on the App Store in the continent, with 37 percent quarter-on-quarter growth. However, Garena Free Fire emerged as the top game on Google Play in Asia. Garena Free Fire Max also managed to get more than 60 percent of its Google Play downloads in Asia in the last quarter, whereas the original title took the other 39 percent, the report shows.
In terms of demographics, India has continued to be the largest market for app downloads in the world in the first quarter. It was followed by the US, Brazil, and Indonesia, per the report.
India continued to lead in the top app markets worldwide in Q1 2022 Photo Credit: Sensor Tower
Sensor Tower also noted that Meta emerged as the top publisher across the globe for the first time since the first quarter of 2020. Google and ByteDance were, though, the two other top publishers in the app market globally.
Overall, worldwide downloads of apps grew 1.4 percent in the first quarter to 36.9 billion from the 36.4 billion downloads reported for the first quarter last year. Downloads from the App Store globally increased to 8.6 billion from 8.4 billion last year, while Google Play downloads reached 28.3 billion from 28 billion, Sensor Tower’s report shows.
The report is based on App Store and Google Play download estimates between January 1 and March 31. Download estimates are on a per-user basis and don’t count re-installs and updates of the same app by the same user. Also, Android app download estimates represent downloads from Google Play only and don’t consider download estimates from third-party Android stores.
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