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F acebook has filed a lawsuit in the US against a New Zealand-based company and three individuals that it says have been selling 'fake likes' on Instagram. Through websites such as SocialEnvy.co, IGFamous.net and Likesocial.co, says Facebook, Social Media Series Limited and its directors made more than $9.4 million by selling fake engagement to Instagram users. The three directors of the company have been named locally as Arend Alexander Hubert Nollen, Leon Francis Hedges and David James Pekka Pasanen. Facebook says it sent cease-and-desist letters to two of the company's directors in July and December last year. "We previously suspended accounts associated with the defendants and formally warned them in writing that they were in violation of our Terms of Use, however their activity persisted," says Jessica Romero, Facebook's director of platform enforcement and litigation. Read more at Forbes

T his week was both fantastic and terrible for Facebook. Its latest earnings report shows the company has become an unstoppable force whose user growth and profits are immune to its never-ending parade of privacy and security breaches. Even the FCC appears willing to back down from its confrontation with the company and slap it with a fine that amounts to just a tiny fraction of its quarterly profit, making even legal violations nothing more than the cost of doing business. At the same time, Facebook confronts newly emboldened regulators around the world all clamoring for their own chance to bring the world’s most powerful gatekeeper to heel. The only problem is that Facebook may already be unstoppable. Facebook has much to cheer about. As has become increasingly clear, the public no longer seems to care about their digital privacy or security. Despite breach after breach after breach after breach, users aren’t leaving and aren’t demanding any changes to the company’s business ...

Private Facebook conversations of some 81,000 users were posted after hackers used third-party browser extensions to monitor communication between users, according to a new report. While this might sound reminiscent of the recent Facebook hack that compromised the personal data of some 30 million users that also happened last month, this attack is different than – and completely unrelated to – that previous attack.