Square Says Its New Credit Card Chip Reader Is Faster Than What You're Used To

Square, the mobile payments processing company led by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is introducing a chip card reader it says will process the payments in 4.2 seconds, compared to the industry average of between eight and 13 seconds. That’s big news for a couple reasons.

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Chip cards started rolling out in the US about a year ago, and, as we know by now, they’re glacially slow.

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They are, however, more secure, according to Square's head of hardware product development, Jesse Dorogusker. That’s why they exist in the first place. Or, rather, why the government mandated that US stores have chip-card-accepting technology by October 2015, which still hasn’t really happened, yet. As much as we want the speed of the old magnetic stripe, our money is safer with the chips, for the most part.

Here’s what a faster credit card chip reader could mean for your life:

1. Maybe you won&039;t lose your card

Chip cards are so slow that people have been leaving them at cash registers in droves. Maybe a faster reader will keep people’s attention.

2. A path to the future

Square’s new readers can also process payment methods like Apple Pay and Android Pay — which means you don’t even have to touch your card to the reader. According to Square’s Dorogusker, these are “far superior technology” because these methods typically require a second piece of authentication like a fingerprint.

The US desperately needs more secure credit cards. We have 25 percent of the world’s credit cards but 50 percent of all credit card fraud.

Dorogusker blames the risk of fraud squarely on the magnetic stripe technology. “They’re like cassette tapes,” he told BuzzFeed News.

Giphy / Via giphy.com

3. Shorter lines

During a lunch rush or the holidays at a retail store, every second counts. You might be quick to abandon a line if it’s not moving. Retail workers of the world, rejoice: much less awkward small talk with frustrated customers.

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Don’t expect to see Square’s readers at H&M or Whole Foods any time soon, though. Sellers who make over $500,000 per year only account for 14 percent of the company’s business, according to its Q2 2016 investor letter. However, the company hopes to bring the transaction speed down to three seconds in the near future — maybe that’ll attract more big clients.

Quelle: <a href="Square Says Its New Credit Card Chip Reader Is Faster Than What You&039;re Used To“>BuzzFeed

I Went To My Own Digital Funeral

BuzzFeed News

A few weeks ago, I went to my own funeral. Or at least a simulation of my own funeral. I was sitting in an auditorium, alone except for a trim young man in a black suit, who walked up to a lectern and began speaking. “Good evening,” he said. “We are here to honor the memory of Doree Shafrir. Doree was a beloved friend, daughter, and wife. Our thoughts go out to her loved ones on this day.”

It was more than a little jarring, sitting there listening to this guy talk about me. Doree, he said, was “committed to her work, to social justice and to literature. She showed support to women she’d never even met, and gave platforms to voices of color.” He went on like this for another minute or so, talking about how I’d passed away and “left an empty place” in the hearts of my loved ones. Next, there was a video — all my tweets, scrolling on a huge screen in front of me — and it was only then that I truly started recoiling. My legacy was going to be my tweets about Justin Bieber’s fling with Bronte Blampied, my neighbors&#039; love of Project Runway, my excitement about wearing a dress with pockets to a wedding.

I was at LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art, for an interactive exhibit put on by an organization called the Hereafter Institute, which was started by the 34-year-old artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo. The pitch was vague: The Hereafter Institute, I was told, “evaluates a person&039;s digital afterlife using new technologies.” The “funeral” was the culmination of a half-hour personal tour through a series of exhibits meant to inspire reflection and conversation on our digital afterlives.

What would someone who doesn&039;t know me infer about who I was based solely on my online presence?

For centuries, people have been trying to figure out how to achieve immortality — or at least extend their lifespans. Today, billionaires like Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, and Sergey Brin are spending part of their fortunes on research that they hope will allow them to extend their lifespans. Perhaps the most radical ideas are coming out of Dmitry Itskov&039;s 2045 Initiative, an organization that hopes to eventually be able to meld human heads with robot bodies. For the non-billionaires among us, digital immortality will have to do.

I&039;ve long been fascinated by the posthumous digital lives of others, but I&039;d never really thought about what would happen to my own self-created online presence after I&039;m dead — and more important, how it could be manipulated, even by people with the best of intentions. As someone who likes to maintain a modicum of control over her online presence (don&039;t we all?), this notion started to feel more than a little bit scary. What would someone who doesn&039;t know me infer about who I was based solely on my online presence? At least when I&039;m alive, my social media is a constantly updated, organically changing thing; once I&039;m dead, it&039;s all frozen in amber. Would that same online presence serve as a comfort to people who knew me, a kind of poignant memorial? Or, most terrifyingly of all, would no one care?

A “funeral” at the Hereafter Institute, an installation at LACMA.

Courtesy Gabriel Barcia-Colombo

I&039;m not proud of the fact that when I hear about a celebrity dying, I check to see what their last tweet was. I obsessively read the Last Message Received Tumblr, which posts the last communication (usually texts) that people got from exes, or family and friends who died; the ones that are the most painful to read are the mundane ones from friends who were then killed by drunk drivers.

In 2016, the human condition is marked by existential despair in thinking about being remembered for a few lackluster, dashed-off tweets and silly photos.

These transmissions can appear cruelly unremarkable, but after death, even the most ordinary dribs and drabs of communication feel poignant to their loved ones. Like the Hereafter Institute&039;s project, the Last Message Received is saying: You matter. You matter, and the world you lived in matters, and the people you loved — they matter too.

Still, I can’t help but think I&039;ll want to keep everything away from the prying eyes of people like me when someone I’m close to dies.

Aren&039;t we really just expressing anxieties about our own mortality when we voraciously consume the digital afterlives of others? When I think about it in this light, I&039;m more forgiving of my morbid, voyeuristic habit. If there is an upside to my obsession with these inadvertent social media memorials, it&039;s that they have made me more aware of the permanence of my online presence, which, in the moment, can seem deceptively ephemeral. In 2016, the human condition is marked by existential despair in thinking about being remembered for a few lackluster, dashed-off tweets and silly photos. What if the last thing I ever tweet is a complaint about how much Time Warner Cable sucks? And so, whether we like it or not, life now requires no small degree of constant self-examination about our own legacies, online and off.

Courtesy Gabriel Barcia-Colombo

When I arrived at the entrance of the Hereafter Institute&039;s exhibit, I was greeted by a young blonde woman (an actor, I later learned) in a lab coat, who began by asking me a series of questions about my online presence, including which social networks I had accounts on and which dating apps I’d used. I was left, by that simple exercise, with the uncomfortable knowledge that my digital legacy goes far beyond a bunch of photos on Instagram. It’s a LinkedIn profile where I’ll always be working at BuzzFeed, a Clue profile where my next period is always just a few weeks away, my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify updating until the end of time. I sat there wondering if my Apple ID would exist forever and if new episodes of Who? Weekly would keep downloading well after I was gone.

Then I stood on a platform while another Hereafter Institute guide took a 3D scan of my body — a scan I would later see animated at my “funeral” — and led me to another building at the museum, where there exhibit continued. There, I saw a record player on a stand where tweets by a man named Fernando Rafael Heria Jr. scrolled on a black screen. (I later found out he had been hit by a car and killed in 2010 while riding his bike in Miami; he was 25.) “Ever wanted to kick someone in the throat?” said one tweet, from March 20, 2010. “Fernando Rafael Heria Jr. shared a link: Brian Piccolo: Thursday Night Criterium Series,” said another from March 25 of that year.

Next, I was led over to a different part of the same room, where I put on a virtual reality headset and found myself engulfed in the separate worlds of three people who had died. It was like a video game, with voiceovers by friends and family (and in one case, a reading by one of the deceased). Barcia-Colombo explained that his intention was to create a memorial to the dead that would allow people a small window into their lived experiences.

A few days after I went through the exhibit, I spoke with Barcia-Colombo by phone. “I was really interested in this sort of bizarre thing that’s happening now, where people pass away on the internet and there’s no real virtual practice put in place for what we do with this data,” he said. “I&039;ve had friends that have passed away, and yet people don&039;t really know, and they still wish them happy birthday. Or people tweet after they&039;ve died because they&039;ve set up auto-tweeting. I thought it was a really sort of interesting time in our culture, and our conversation about death is really changing.”

“At some point there&039;s going to be more people who&039;ve passed away on Facebook than there are alive people on Facebook.”

Last year, Facebook instituted a policy that allows you to designate a person to maintain your Facebook page after you die; your page lives on, but is changed to a “memorial” page. But what happens when that person dies? And so on? “At some point there&039;s going to be more people who&039;ve passed away on Facebook than there are alive people on Facebook,” Barcia-Colombo said. “What is that going to mean?”

We don’t know the answer to that question yet. But what does it mean when even the most off-the-cuff content that we produced when we were alive has the potential to become a posthumous representation of ourselves? It’s exhausting enough to maintain a digital presence while we’re alive. Now are we expected to also be mindful of how our digital selves will be perceived after death?

Today&039;s teenagers are enamored with pointedly ephemeral social media like Snapchat, where posts disappear quickly and (seemingly) forever, and maybe they&039;re onto something. Maybe the next generation is so conscious of digital legacies that they&039;ve decided not to create one at all. But I&039;m too far gone, I think, to make my social media presence disappear; I am a self-archivist by nature, and erasing everything is scarier to me than the idea that someone might piece together a contextless version of me after I die.

All of this awareness adds another complicated layer to the notion of the digital self — one that a quick perusal of my Twitter feed tells me I am definitely not ready for. We may not be sentient beings in death, but whether we like it or not, we will continue to exist long after our bodies are dead and gone.

BuzzFeed News

Quelle: <a href="I Went To My Own Digital Funeral“>BuzzFeed

Trump Hotels Kept Their Customers' Credit Card Hack Secret For Months

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally September 22, 2016 in Aston, Pennsylvania.

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The Trump Hotel Collection has agreed to pay thousands of dollars in penalties for not properly disclosing a series of hacks on its computer network, dating back to 2014, that resulted in the theft of 70,000 of its customers’ credit card numbers and other personal data.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced the settlement with the Trump Hotel Collection on Friday. The hotel chain, whose locations from Las Vegas to New York were affected by the data breach, will have to shell out $50,000. As part of the settlement, the chain also committed to improving its data security practices.

In May 2015, according to the Attorney General’s press release, multiple banks found that thousands of fraudulent credit card transactions traced back to several hotels under the management of Trump International. Investigators soon linked the stolen credit card information to a cyber attack on May 19, 2014, when a hacker accessed Trump International Hotels’ payment processing system through an administrative account using legitimate login credentials. The hacker then deployed malware into the system that stole the hotels’ customer credit card information and other data, according to the Attorney General’s office.

Investigators alerted Trump International Hotels of the attack in June 2015, but the company did not notify its customers until September of that year, when it posted a notice of the breach on its website. This delay was the basis of the Attorney General’s recent charges, which found that Trump International violated a New York business law that requires hacked companies to notify consumers “in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay.”

Six Trump hotels in New York City, Miami, Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, and Toronto were affected by the hack.

A spokesperson for Trump Hotels said in a prepared statement, “Unfortunately, cyber criminals seeking consumer data have recently infiltrated the systems of many organizations, including almost every major hotel company. Safeguarding our customers’ data is a top priority for the company and we will continue taking actions to do so.”

The credit card theft was not Trump International Hotels’ only data breach in the past few years, the Attorney General’s office found. In November 2015 — five months after the hotel chain had learned of the first hack — a hacker installed credit card harvesting software in Trump International’s system that yielded information used in more credit card fraud. Fraud investigators found that the hacker later took more personal information, including the social security numbers of about 300 people, from a different company system in March 2016. Trump International received notice of these breaches in late March 2016, but the company waited three months, until June 2016, to tell its customers that their data had been stolen from its system.

Forensic investigators had recommended that Trump International implement two-factor authentication after the first breach, back in 2015. The company waited until April 2016 to do so, and the Attorney General said Trump International could have prevented the subsequent breaches if it had bolstered its security the first time it learned about its system’s security vulnerabilities.

Paul Martini, CEO of iBoss Cybersecurity, said of the breach, “Understanding the severity of [a] breach can be complex … but there&#039;s no excuse to withhold news of the breach. Some organizations say they&039;re going to gather more info; some raise their hands and say, &039;we don&039;t have the expertise&039; — but any choice should include reporting the breach.”

As for the forensic investigators&039; recommendations, Martini said even those steps might not have been enough to protect the hotel customers&039; data. “Multi-factor authentication would have helped preclude someone logging into the network administrator&039;s account, but it wouldn&039;t have prevented the hijacking after the malware was already in the payments processor,” he told BuzzFeed News.

When BuzzFeed News asked what this data breach means for Trump&039;s cybersecurity record as the Republican nominee, his campaign responded:

“Donald Trump is the only candidate who will ensure American interests are effectively protected, unlike Hillary Clinton who has proven herself to be utterly incompetent as evidenced by her illegal use of an unsecured email server that was completely vulnerable to hacking.”

Quelle: <a href="Trump Hotels Kept Their Customers&039; Credit Card Hack Secret For Months“>BuzzFeed

Cracking The Tinder Code: Love In The Age Of Algorithms

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I used to be terrible at Tinder — but for a few weeks this summer, I was pretty good. Women responded to my messages. Our chats went deeper than usual. Previously stalled discussions were suddenly revived and I was right-swiped with increasing frequency. I began to understand my matches in a way I hadn’t previously, but not because of anything I&#039;d done. My Tinder messages were being composed by a woman who also set up my profile. And I was using Tinder’s on staff sociologist’s input to refine my approach.

I handed over my account to my colleague, Jessica Misener, on a hunch (correct) that I wasn’t doing things right on Tinder. And while Jessica didn’t really need the help, I took over her account as well. We embarked on our great switcheroo in an attempt to get to the bottom of what makes Tinder tick; customizing each other’s profiles to what we thought people of our gender wanted, releasing those accounts into the wild, and then comparing the results to our past luck.

We swapped accounts on the condition that no message could be sent without the explicit approval of its real owner — this was a quest to understand the inner workings of the platform, not dupe people. And, when we were done, we brought our findings to Tinder, which reviewed them and — based on its own research including some previously unreleased data — told us what we&039;d done right and wrong. Spoiler: I had a lot to learn. And judging from the Tinder profiles we saw, you probably do too.

Downloaded by more than 100 million people, Tinder is responsible for some 1.5 million in-person dates each week, according to its creators. It’s helped to normalize “meeting online.” Tinder did this with an ingeniously simple swipe “right for like”/”swipe left for dislike” vetting process, connecting people only when there is mutual interest. Its soaring popularity has helped revolutionize modern dating, shifting us from finding love via chance to finding it via algorithm.

Wearing a hat in your Tinder profile pic? That’ll hurt your chances by 12%.

The secrets of Tinder&039;s code lie in the hands of people like Dr. Jess Carbino, a Tinder employee with a sociology PhD. from UCLA. She has a lot of visibility into what works on Tinder and what doesn&039;t. For instance: Wearing glasses in your profile picture, whether for vision or sun, decreases your chances of being right-swiped by 15%. And a hat? That’ll hurt your chances by 12%.

“It&039;s really important for people to able to glean a great deal about your face, which indicates things beyond attractiveness,” Dr. Carbino explained in a phone interview from Tinder’s Los Angeles headquarters last week. Tinder is willing to share a good deal of this data because, at the end of the day, it wants people to find satisfying matches. And, if you use Tinder, you probably want more matches too. So take your damn hat off. And, while you’re at it, those shades need to go too.

In Trusted Hands

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Looking through the men showing up on Jessica’s Tinder account, I saw many dudes presenting themselves with blurry pictures, mirror selfies, hats, nowhere-looking gazes, and other off-the-charts terrible selfies. When I saw a guy with a clear picture, smiling and looking toward the camera, I instantly swiped right.

When Jessica set up my profile, she chose a picture of me looking sideways to start, and then followed with a few looking straight at the camera. A week in, thinking about that man with the straightforward smile, I suggested we switch up my own profile. We chose a photo I didn’t love, but where I looked straight at the camera and smiled. It worked significantly better than my previous profile pic.

“Individuals who are front facing are 20% more likely to be swiped right on.”

The forward-facing smile was the right move, according to Tinder’s Dr. Carbino. “Individuals who are front facing are 20% more likely to be swiped right on, relative to their counterparts who are facing sideways or not showing themselves,” Dr .Carbino said. Even though I felt the smiling picture was worse than any other, it made a big difference: you are 14% more likely to be swiped right on if you smile on Tinder, Dr. Carbino said.

After Jessica landed a few matches on my behalf, I watched in amazement as she crafted thoughtful, personalized messages to each. My opening message is perhaps best described as, “How’s it going?” Jessica describes hers as: “Not just, ‘Oh cool you&039;re from North Carolina? I like Asheville a lot,’ but: “Oh you&039;re from North Carolina? I&039;ve always wondered if the Carolinas have a rivalry about which is better. like South Carolina is OBVIOUSLY cooler but North Carolina is literally on top of it, which seems significant to me.”

Jessica’s method proved effective. Conversations kicked off with thoughtful messages were far richer than my usual “Hey,” “Sup,” “Nm, U?” variety. And Tinder’s data seems to bear this out. Dr. Carbino said Tinder is conducting a messaging analysis study, and its initial results indicate more thoughtful messages are more likely to generate responses. You can also always send a GIF, which is 30% more likely to get a response, according to Dr. Carbino.

Viewing Tinder from my colleague Jessica’s vantage point, I didn’t need any special conversational tactics. If anything, the biggest challenge was weeding people out.

Stampede

Xavier Arnau / Getty Images

Running Jessica’s account felt like watching dozens of men attempting to run through the same tiny door at once. It was overwhelming. As I swiped right, a pattern emerged: Match. Match. Match. Match. Message. Message. Message. Message. These guys meant business. They were relentless.

Watching them in action, I began to rethink one of my core Tinder principals: never double text. Sending a message, waiting, and sending another message despite no response had long been no go territory for me. It felt needy, and a bit delusional. If someone was interested, they’d respond. If not, they wouldn’t. But as I witnessed the volume and pace of messages hitting Jessica’s Tinder, I very quickly saw the folly of my ways.

Double texting works, according to Dr. Carbino, who calls it re-engagement. “The idea of re-engagement, if done in a way that&039;s appropriate, can be quite effective,” she told me. “You can say something along the lines of, “Hey, it&039;s time to step up your Tinder text game&039; and make a joke out of it to re-engage them and to try to further the conversation along in a way that&039;s more meaningful.”

On Tinder, you can also use a ‘Super Like’ button once every 24 hours to signal more interest than the ordinary ‘like,’ but the people using this feature felt a bit off to me, so I started swiping left and rejecting them all out of habit. That wasn’t a normal behavior. Super Likers, according to Tinder, are three times more likely to match, and their conversations typically last 70% longer than those of non-Super Likers.

Super Like or not, you may want to go for the real-world encounter early as possible. People who meet in person via Tinder typically do so within 2-7 days of matching, according to Dr. Carbino.

Tinder God Emerges

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“I always said great advertising should be like dating.”

When you first sign up for Tinder, a text overlay appears on the app urging you to “Swipe more to help us learn your preferences. The more you swipe, the better our recommendations&#033;” The prompt is subtle, and it’s also the most prominent indicator that Tinder sorts the profiles it shows you via an algorithm — a mathematical formula that pulls in a number of data points and makes decisions about who comes next.

The keys to Tinder’s algorithm are held by Dan Gould, a former advertising technology executive who spent the early part of his career attempting to match the right ad to the right person at the right time — now he’s doing it with people. That a former ad-tech exec now holds a power position at a dating company says a lot about the role of algorithms in romance today. “I always said great advertising should be like dating,” Gould told me. “If advertising works perfectly, it would be like finding that great partner for you. It would find the right thing, at the right time, at the right price, and maybe something you didn’t even know.”

According to Gould, Tinder&039;s algorithm gives a lot of weight to the choices you make while setting preferences. Distance ranges, gender and age preferences — all these things need to match up before Tinder will show you a potential match. Two other critical factors are distance and recency. Distance is straightforward: being closer gives you an edge. But “active time,” i.e. recency, is more intriguing. “People who have been active recently are more likely to come back soon and interact with other people.” Gould said. “While I probably shouldn’t say how you can game the system, the one thing that a person can really do to appear to a lot more people and get more matches is to be active recently. If I were trying to get more matches I would open the app every hour and just swipe a little bit.”

Swipe Life

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In their book Modern Romance: An Investigation, the comedian Aziz Ansari and NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg describe asking a woman to project her OkCupid in-box on a screen in an LA comedy club. “The moment we put her in-box up on the screen, you could see every man in the room just deflate,” Klinenberg said in a recent phone interview. “They suddenly realized what they were up against.”

The draw of that choice is so powerful that Seattle-based Ricky Burnett, founder of a company called Project Attraction, a dating coaching service that promises to help men “become the confident, bad ass guy that women obsess over,” said he sees a lot less competition when trying to meet someone in real life. “I consider it to be a lost art these days,” he explained. “You kind of put people in awe when you just walk up to them and say ‘hi.’”

Proliferation of choice can have negative consequences as well. With so many potential matches to swipe on, they all become a bit more … disposable. “Go back to [the pre-Tinder] era,” said relationship Psychologist Dr. Karen Sherman. “If you didn’t meet somebody in college then what the hell were you going to do? Because then you were pretty much out of possibilities. Now, so what?

For Dr. Carbino, algorithmically-assisted courtship is a clear net positive. “There&039;s so much data out there that suggests that individuals who meet their partners online have more satisfactory relationships and are more likely to get married faster, relative to individuals who meet offline,” she said.

Klinenberg is of a similar opinion. He likes to tell a story of how he and Ansari once asked a “pretty average looking” guy for a look at his dating in-box. The guy, Klinenberg said, had messages from women who “30 years ago, if he had gone to a bar and they had given him their phone number, he would’ve gone crazy, it would’ve been the greatest night of his life.” There&039;s a lesson in that in-box: “There’s a lot of volume. Even if that guy was striking out 95% of the time, it’s a whole lot easier to start flirting with someone and ask them out online, than it is in person.”

After swapping Tinder accounts with Jessica and getting Tinder&039;s input, I made more progress on long-unanswerable question: “What did I do wrong?” than ever before. You can&039;t quantify everything in the age of algorithms, but more and more is becoming knowable. Now if you&039;ll excuse me, I have some swiping to do.

Quelle: <a href="Cracking The Tinder Code: Love In The Age Of Algorithms“>BuzzFeed

How Twitter Would Fit Inside Salesforce

Salesforce

As Twitter struggles to grow its userbase and meet Wall Street&#039;s expectations, its been increasingly the subject of rumors that it may have to sell out in order to stay alive. Those rumors really ramped up today following a CNBC report that a number of companies have expressed interest in buying the social platform and formal bids could be in soon from the likes of Google and others.

But one potential named suitor left a lot of people scratching their heads and others even downright sullen: Salesforce. Salesforce is a business-to-business technology company that&039;s prominent within that circle but relatively unknown in the consumer space.

But the two companies could fit well together, for a number of reasons. Consider the following:

The Ad-Tech

This is the big one. Salesforce&039;s core product helps you market and sell to people you know, ad-tech helps you market to people you don&039;t know (yet). Twitter has made two ad-tech acquisitions (MoPub and TellApart) and has hundreds of millions of logged in users, helping it connect user identify across devices. Bringing Twitter&039;s ad-tech capabilities in house could provide Salesforce with a more deeply integrated offering at a time when its entire industry is working on ways to own the “full funnel,” helping clients message from the point someone first becomes aware of their product to the moment when they buy it.

The Intelligence

If Salesforce can parse meaning from Twitter data (Executive A is interested in X,Y and Z), it could help prospecting sales reps be smarter about the way they approach potential customers. Earlier this month, Salesforce introduced “Einstein,” an AI-powered product that Salesforce promises can help its clients by “automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.” For AI to work, it needs a lot of data. Twitter has a mountain of data. By purchasing Twitter and all its associated data, Salesforce could get that product revving fast.

The Small Social Fit

Salesforce has tried its hand at social with Chatter, a social platform built into its product, but that part of Salesforce could use some improvement (spoken as a former sales guy who&039;s used it). Having Twitter&039;s staff build up the social aspects of Salesforce could be big for the company. Executed right, it would increase the cohesiveness and communication among teams using the product.

Bret Taylor

Twitter board member Bret Taylor sold his company, Quip, to Salesforce in August for $582 million. As Recode points out, “some people think he’d be a good fit to run Twitter’s core product.” So Salesforce could already have a product head in place.

The Benioff Factor

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is a showman and a guy who likes to stir the pot. Benioff has stuck his neck out on enough social issues that he could probably enjoy some goodwill as he works to fix Twitter&039;s harassment issue, one of its biggest problems. Benioff also happens to like social, and thinks it&039;s critical to his customers&039; success. As he told CNBC a few years ago: “As a marketer, as a sales professional, you&039;d better know what&039;s happening on those social networks because those are your customers. We&039;ve seen brands go haywire when one tweet goes wrong.”

Quelle: <a href="How Twitter Would Fit Inside Salesforce“>BuzzFeed

Facebook Says Safety Check Was Activated By People Near Charlotte Protests

What began as a tool for people in Nepal to mark themselves “safe” after 2015&#039;s devastating earthquake is now being used by protestors in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Facebook&039;s Safety Check — a feature that has so far been deployed in the wake of natural disasters, bombings, and violent crime — was activated Thursday following protests sparked by the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old black man.

A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that this was the first time Safety Check has been activated for a protest. The company also confirmed that it was initiated by people in the protest area, and not the Facebook itself.

Thursday marked the third night of demonstrations in Charlotte, with Mayor Jennifer Roberts declaring a midnight curfew. But police did not enforce it early Friday morning, as the protests remained peaceful.

Earlier in the week, however, the violence led Gov. Pat McCrory to declare a state of emergency in Charlotte, calling in the National Guard and state troopers to help maintain order. In the midst of the unrest Wednesday night, one protestor, 26-year-old Justin Carr, was shot and later died on Thursday, according to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.

Since its release in October 2014, Facebook&039;s Safety Check had been used by people in the immediate aftermath of earthquakes and cyclones, but that changed last year when the mass-shooting in Paris compelled Facebook to provide the tool to those affected by the bloodshed.

Safety check has since been triggered by other violent events, including the Orlando nightclub shooting and the attack in Nice, France. But never before has it been activated by protests.

Facebook confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the Charlotte safety check was triggered not by the company, but by people in the area. “When a significant number of people post about a specific incident and are in a crisis area, they will be asked to mark themselves safe through Safety Check,” the spokesperson said.

Those individuals can then invite their friends to mark themselves safe. Facebook began testing this community-based activation in June, but the social network can still choose to deploy Safety Check itself, notifying everyone in a particular area, as it did in Orlando.

For events that impact a large number of people, and demand haste, Facebook&039;s procedure is to “look at a combination of the scope, scale and duration of the incident to determine when it is appropriate for Facebook to notify everyone in an area,” the spokesperson said.

As with previous Safety Checks, notably following the Paris shooting, Facebook has drawn criticism for what some see as bias or selectivity in determining which events merit a Safety Check.

Addressing charges that Facebook was ignoring the plight of people in Beirut following a deadly suicide attack last year, the company&039;s vice president of growth said Safety Check isn&039;t useful for enduring conflicts. “During an ongoing crisis, like war or epidemic, Safety Check in its current form is not that useful for people, because there isn&039;t a clear start or end point and, unfortunately, it&039;s impossible to know when someone is truly safe,&039;” wrote Alex Schultz in a Facebook post last November.

The Charlotte Safety Check has prompted another strain of criticism — this time, about coloring the perceptions of what the protests represent.

The spokesperson said that Facebook is working “to find the best way for Safety Check to be helpful to the most people,” including testing and improving on safety alerts initiated by people in affected communities.

Quelle: <a href="Facebook Says Safety Check Was Activated By People Near Charlotte Protests“>BuzzFeed