As Facebook settles into its second decade of existence, Time magazine’s Lev Grossman considers how the social giant and its founder have evolved, and what’s in store for their future. Of particular interest to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is working on ways to give the entire world what many in the West now think of as an essential utility: a Web connection. “Fulfilling [Facebook’s] actual mission, connecting the entire world, wouldn’t actually, literally be possible unless everybody in the world were on the Internet,” Grossman writes. “So Zuckerberg has decided to make sure everybody is.”
Gigaom
UK government officials have taken time off from attacking Google to slam top social networks and their abstruse terms and conditions. According to a UK parliamentary committee, “the unsuitability of the T&Cs had been demonstrated by episodes such as Facebook’s emotion-manipulation study, in which Facebook deliberately made some of its users sad as an experiment,” GigaOm reports. According to a new report from the government’s Science and Technology Committee: “We have not been convinced that the users of social media platforms are fully aware of how their data might be used.”