Facebook now says that up to 87 million users may have had their data exploited by Cambridge Analytica; original reports pegged the number closer to 50 million. Next Monday, Facebook will begin alerting users whose data has been improperly shared. Meanwhile, just weeks before its annual developer conference, Facebook is making sweeping changes to many of its most important APIs and will stop sharing as much of your personal data with third-party apps and people outside of the service. The company also rewrote its terms of service and data policies. Here are the details. CEO Mark Zuckerberg also confirmed that all text and images sent via its Messenger service are scanned to ensure they are in line with community standards. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Recode Daily: Mark Zuckerberg starts his damage control tour
Plus, here’s who benefits most from Spotify’s IPO, Google employees decry the company’s involvement with a Pentagon drone project, and texting is how we talk now.
Mark Zuckerberg also said yesterday that Facebook hasn’t felt “any meaningful impact” in its usage or business in the wake of the privacy scandal. Zuckerberg hosted a rare conference call with reporters, where he made the comments. He is headed to Washington, D.C., next week to testify about Facebook’s data privacy before two U.S. Senate committees on Tuesday and a House committee on Wednesday. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Here’s who benefits the most from Spotify’s Tuesday IPO, which valued the streaming company at about $25 billion: CEO Daniel Ek owns just over 9 percent of the company, which means he is sitting on about $2.3 billion of Spotify stock at its current price. Other big stockholders include the investing firms Tiger Global, TCV and the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, each of which controls between 5 percent and 10 percent of the stock. What’s unusual about Spotify’s direct listing tactic is that company insiders are not required to hold onto their shares in “lock-up” for an extended period of time. So Ek could sell his shares today and go buy a mansion or two tomorrow. [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Thousands of Google workers signed an internal petition protesting the company’s involvement in a Pentagon pilot program that uses artificial intelligence that could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes. More than 3,100 employees, including dozens of senior engineers, signed the letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, which says, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” and asks for a policy that the company will not “ever build warfare technology.” [Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi / The New York Times]
Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube headquarters once again demonstrated Twitter’s usefulness as a real-time news source — and highlighted how bad the company’s problems are with bots and misinformation. [Charlie Warzel and Jane Lytvyenko / BuzzFeed News]
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
