Corporate Tweeting
Data analysis by the Harvard Business Review has revealed that among the top 50 companies that handle their Twitter accounts better are American Airlines, Bank of America, Kraft Foods, Dish Network, Verizon and Facebook. Other big names in the list are Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Intel, Kraft, Whole Foods, McDonalds, Lowes, Amazon.com and FedEx. Starbucks shares the “worst 50” space with Burberry, American Express, Allergan, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, United Health Group and Hewlett Packard. For the study, the team used data analysis to identify patterns and quantify degrees of engagement. After analysing 350,000 tweets across 300 companies, they were able to pinpoint which brands are winning at Twitter and which are not. Empathy is a vital component for corporate tweeting.
Data sharing on Facebook
If you are bewildered by the expanse of data that many apps and websites have about you, relax. Facebook is about to give you greater control, now, over how much data you want to share with others. Also, apps that Facebook determines are asking for unnecessary information from users could have their data access revoked. A new version of Facebook Login, to be rolled out shortly, will present users with a prompt - “Edit the info you provide”. Clicking it will let users grant or deny access to different types of information. The login now also highlights who will see content posted by the app on Facebook, for apps that request the ability to doso, pcworld.com reported. Many of the most popular apps, like Pinterest and Netflix, are already using it and over the next few weeks, Facebook will turn on the system for every app that uses Facebook Login.
Online voting
Even as voters gear up to stand in queue for Britain’s upcoming general election this month, researchers, including one of Indian origin, have developed a technique to allow people to vote online - even if their home computers are suspected of being infected with viruses.Taking inspiration from the security devices issued by some banks, Gurchetan Grewal and colleagues from the University of Birmingham have developed a system that allows people to vote by employing independent hardware devices in conjunction with their personal computers. “The new technique offers a fresh contribution to the debate surrounding e-voting and could be ready for use in time for the 2020 or 2025 general election, the study noted.
Find apps that secretly connect to ad sites
Security researchers have developed an automated system for detecting Android apps that secretly connect to ad sites and user tracking sites. Many apps connect to ad-related sites and tracking sites while some connect to much more dubious sites that are associated with malware. “Luigi Vigneri and colleagues from Eurecom in France have developed an app that monitors the behaviour of others on a user’s smartphone and reveals exactly which external sites these apps are attempting to connect to. They call their new app NoSuchApp or NSA for short “in honour of a similarly acronymed monitoring agency”, reported MIT Technology Review.
“With this application, our goal is to provide a mechanism for end users to be aware of the network activity of their installed Android applications,” said Vigneri.
The team plan to make the app publicly available on Google Play in the near future. Vigneri and colleagues began by downloading over 2,000 free apps from all 25 categories on the Google Play store.
They then launched each app on a Samsung Galaxy SIII running Android version 4.1.2 that was set up to channel all traffic through the team’s server. This recorded all the urls that each app attempted to contact. They found that the apps connect to a mindboggling 250,000 different urls across almost 2,000 top-level domains. And while most attempt to connect to just a handful of ad and tracking sites, some are much more prolific. The worst offender is an app called Eurosport Player which connects to 810 different user tracking sites. A small proportion of the apps even seem designed to connect to suspicious sites connected with malware, the researchers found.
