For the six months ending Dec. 31, 2012, Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for user data from U.S. government entities at all levels, local and national, related to between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts, outgoing Facebook General Counsel Ted Ullyot revealed in a release on Facebook’s Newsroom.
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According to the latest report from eMarketer, Facebook will go from no mobile Internet ad revenues whatsoever in 2011 to a 12.9 percent share of the market in 2013, with the digital marketing analysts pegging the social network’s total for the year at more than $2 billion.
Facebook continued to take steps to deny any involvement in the National Security Agency’s Prism initiative, in which the government agency allegedly obtained direct access to its servers, with Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterating his denial of last Friday during his talk at the social network’s annual meeting Tuesday, and the company asking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to allow it to fully disclose the total number of secret requests it receives to surrender user data.
With the uproar over the National Security Agency’s Prism initiative, in which the NSA allegedly obtained direct access to the servers of Internet companies including Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, Skype, and AOL, those companies are likely facing heightened scrutiny, despite firm denials by Facebook and by its co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, of any knowledge of or participation in Prism. A few eyebrows were likely raised over the weekend, when access to Tumblr page Obama Is Checking Your Email was being blocked by the social network, but the situation has been rectified.
Reports out of Israel indicate that satellite-navigation startup Waze, which had been in talks with Facebook, will instead be acquired by Google in a transaction valued at about $1.3 billion.
Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded Friday to claims that the site had granted the U.S. government access to its servers. He called the reports “outrageous,” and noted that if Facebook were to ever receive such a request, the company would fight it.
Facebook responded to the bombshell reports Thursday about a long-term Internet-spying initiative led by the National Security Agency, code-named Prism, by denying that it has ever allowed any government agency to have direct access to its servers.
The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a poll for the second consecutive year to find out which of three tech giants — Google, Apple, and Facebook — was the most liked, and the companies finished in the same order: Google at 83 percent, Apple at 72 percent, and Facebook at 60 percent.
When Facebook introduced Graph Search in January, it was perceived as a threat to social reviewing site Yelp. Despite that — or possibly because of it — Yelp is interested in teaming up with Facebook.
Facebook is no longer in talks to acquire Israel-based satellite-navigation startup Waze, according to a report in AllThingsD, and Waze’s desire to keep its team intact in Israel and not shutter its development center there represented a major obstacle.
