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"The articles were so widely and quickly shared that they triggered Facebook's spam filters, which blocked the most popular stories about the breach, including an AP story and a Guardian story. There's no reason to think that Facebook intentionally suppressed embarrassing news about its own business. Rather, this is a cautionary tale about the consequences of content filtering on big platforms."

"A group of current and former contractors who worked for years at the social network's Berlin-based moderation centres has reported witnessing colleagues become "addicted" to graphic content and hoarding ever more extreme examples for a personal collection. They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day."

"The study by US-based thinktank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina."

"It is time now for two things: for people to wake up and realise how much our lives are dominated by such a small number of Silicon Valley bros, one hand in their jean pocket announcing their next move, and for tech companies to acknowledge their power and influence and become truly accountable."

"The other day I noticed that the little green light next to the camera built into my computer screen was on. It's perfectly possible that I had recently used some app that required the camera, and forgotten about it; but I couldn't find a way to turn it off. It's unlikely anyone was really watching me pretend to work, but my computer definitely was."

""Face recognition … might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things." Excuse me? What kind of benefits could possibly balance the risk of making life extremely easy for stalkers and creeps? Well, Bosworth later said on Twitter, it could help people with prosopagnosia, a neurological condition where you can't recognize people's faces. More generally, Bosworth said, it would be super handy when you run into someone at a party and can't remember their name. Ah yes, I can totally see how avoiding a little social awkwardness balances out the whole stalker thing!"

"Rather to Facebook's surprise, Free Basics was not universally welcomed in some of its target territories. The most vocal opposition came in India, the most important market outside of the west, where ungrateful critics perceived it an example of "digital colonialism" and it was eventually blocked by the country's telecoms regulator on the grounds that it violated the principle of net neutrality by explicitly favouring some kinds of online content while effectively blocking others. Beyond India, however, Free Basics seems to be thriving, being used by "up to 100 million" people in 65 countries, including 28 in Africa."