“I’ve heard this speculation, too, so let me be clear: There’s no deal of any kind,” Zuckerberg told Axios. “Actually, the whole idea of a deal is pretty ridiculous.”

While Trump faces increasing scrutiny for rule violations on other social platforms — most notably Twitter — the president’s activity on Facebook has largely remained untouched. In October, Zuckerberg faced criticism for attending an undisclosed dinner at the White House with the president and Facebook board member and close Trump ally Peter Thiel.

“I accepted the invite for dinner because I was in town and he is the president of the United States,” Zuckerberg said, noting that he’d done the same during the Obama administration. “The fact that I met with a head of state should not be surprising, and does not suggest we have some kind of deal.”

In a company Q & A last week, the Facebook CEO defended his relationship with President Trump to employees.

Read Also – Mahmood Ahmadu – Protecting Wealth Creators in Nigeria

“One specific critique that I’ve seen is that there are a lot of people who’ve said that maybe we’re too sympathetic or too close in some way to the Trump administration,” Zuckerberg said, arguing that “giving people some space for discourse” was not the same as agreeing with their beliefs.

While there’s certainly a notably friendly dynamic between Facebook and the Trump administration, an explicit agreement designed to benefit Facebook isn’t that likely, if only because of the firestorm it would ignite were it to come to light. The idea that Facebook could extract a deal from the president, say for less regulatory scrutiny, is also hard to imagine due to the fact that any change to regulations governing Facebook would also apply to other online platforms. When President Trump signed an executive order designed to punish Twitter for taking action against his tweets, that threat applied across the board to all social media sites, including Facebook.

Still, the Justice Department, which often works closely with Trump’s White House to pursue the president’s own agenda, can choose which fights to pick in its antitrust pursuits. And Trump’s ability to mobilize his political allies in Congress against enemies of his choosing could create headaches for a company like Facebook around claims of political bias. Facebook’s seemingly conciliatory stance toward the White House and the Trump campaign isn’t likely to have gone unnoticed.

Zuckerberg’s reluctance to criticize Trump is well-documented, but he has been slightly more critical of the administration in recent days. Last week, he held a live-streamed chat with Anthony Fauci, a key voice for the scientific community’s pandemic response — and one currently on the outs with Trump. In the chat, Zuckerberg didn’t name Trump explicitly but criticized the U.S. government’s failure to scale up national testing and the refusal for some parts of the administration to recommend mask-wearing as a protective measure.

Source – https://techcrunch.com/

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Laleh Shahravesh was arrested under Dubai’s strict cyber-crime laws after she was reported by Samah Al Hammadi for calling her ‘horse face’ on social media three years ago.

Now her 14-year-old daughter Paris has begged the ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, to allow her passport to be returned and let the mother go home.

She described how the pair were stopped at Dubai International Airport and were repeatedly shouted at by officers as they were crying after being separated due to a law banning children from police vehicles. 

Hammadi, 42, initially told authorities Shahravesh, 55, harassed her on Facebook after discovering her ex-husband, Pedro Manuel Coreia Dos Santos, had remarried.

After being reported to police, Shahravesh was arrested last month at the airport along with her daughter when they arrived in the United Arab Emirates for his funeral after he died unexpectedly.   

Shahravesh has been stopped from leaving Dubai for the last 28 days after first being detained in an immigration room at the airport for four hours.

The 55-year-old then went to Jebel Ali Police Station on March 10 and was forced to sign a statement in Arabic and has been unable to leave Dubai ever since.

Paris Shahravesh wrote to Sheikh Mohammed today begging him to let her mother go after she was arrested so soon after her father’s death. 

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Her ordeal began on March 14 when Laleh and her daughter flew to Dubai’s for her ex husband Pedro’s funeral

Paris Shahravesh wrote to the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed, today begging him to allow her mother, Laleh, to return home. Pictured is her signature 

She wrote: ‘I cannot emphasise enough how scared I felt, especially after losing my father just a week before, as I was having to worry about losing my mother as well. 

‘Yet even though I felt terrified on the day that we arrived, the sick feeling in my stomach only became worse. 

‘I have not seen my mother in 23 days, and with every passing day, I feel less hopeful of her return. I ask kindly: please, please return my mother’s passport, and let her come home.’

Shahravesh was given fresh hope when it was revealed earlier today the case against her could be dropped. 

The complainant could reportedly be about to cease all charges after Hammadi said she would not continue ‘out of respect’ for her late husband’s daughter. 

She told Sky News: ‘One of the last messages he [the late husband] tearfully gave me before his death was that he deeply loved his daughter. I am willing to withdraw this case to honour my husband’s love for his daughter.’  

Hammadi claimed she decided to make the complaint after ‘suffering in silence’ for over a year and now has no regrets, despite single mother Shahravesh facing up to two years in jail and a fine of £50,000. 

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Laleh Sharavesh was arrested along with her 14-year-old daughter Paris when she arrived in the Arab kingdom for her ex’s funeral last month 

‘She has been abusing him, sending emails, even to his boss in the bank, saying I am a b***h, that I took him from her, that she doesn’t have money. He sent emails asking her to stop. It did not stop,’ she told the Evening Standard. 

‘It is a crime in Dubai. It is right. I don’t feel sorry. She made him [Mr Santos] suffer in the last year of his life. Let the law take part.’  

Shahravesh has previously told MailOnline she has had ‘little help’ from consular officials in the UAE after her arrest almost a month ago. She is anxiously awaiting her court appearance later this week.  

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In lengthy blog post on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg detailed a plan to bring end-to-end encryption to Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram messaging services – confirming previous reports that the firm planned to stitch the three together.

The Facebook boss acknowledged the site’s reputation, which has been tarnished in recent years as a result of its lax-approach to the protection of personal information, and promised to rebuild its services on the principle of privacy.

Zuckerberg also said he’s also working to ensure your online activity won’t come back to haunt you later in life. 

I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,’ Zuckerberg wrote in the March 6 post. 

‘This is the future I hope we will help bring about.’

The Facebook CEO’s post detailing his ‘privacy-focused vision’ comes just days after a tweet from Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge revealed the site allows users to search for specific profiles using phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication.

And, just a week prior, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed Facebook has been collecting ‘highly sensitive information’ from at least a dozen apps without users’ consent.

In perhaps its best-known privacy scandal, Facebook came under fire in 2018 when it was revealed political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica was given access to the data of 87 million users.

Zuckerberg is now promising to apply the same privacy-focused principles it used in WhatsApp to all of its services moving forward.

In a multi-year plan, Zuckerberg says Facebook will merge its messaging services – WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, and Facebook Messenger – in a way that allows users to communicate across all three apps.

All will be equipped with end-to-end encryption to keep out other people, including ‘hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments, or even the people operating the services they’re using,’ from seeing their private communications.

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Researchers from the University of Vermont discovered that these platforms only need access to eight of your one-time contacts in order to infer information about you. 

It comes as Silicon Valley giants face increased scrutiny about their data collection practices and whether users have enough control over their private information.

‘You alone don’t control your privacy on social media platforms,’ said Jim Bagrow, a mathematician at the University of Vermont who led the research published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. 

‘Your friends have a say too.’ 

Bagrow and his team used statistical models to analyse data from more than 30 million publicly available Twitter posts by almost 14,000 users.

Although the study focused on Twitter, the same information could be gathered form posts on other social media, like Facebook, provided access to them, Bagrow said. 

They found that machine learning algorithms may be able to infer with up to 64 percent accuracy what word a user was most likely to write next, based on what he and the people he interacted most often with had previously published.

Accuracy levels dropped only three percent to 61 percent when the algorithms were fed with text posted only by friends, according to the study.

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