Facebook says 100 app developers may have accessed users' data for months

International News
In yet another data breach, Facebook on Wednesday revealed that at least 100 app developers may have accessed Facebook users' data for months, confirming that at least 11 partners "accessed group members' information in the last 60 days".
The social networking giant found that the apps -- primarily social media management and video streaming apps -- retained access to group member information, like names and profile pictures in connection with group activity, from the Groups API (application programming interface).
"Although we've seen no evidence of abuse, we will ask them to delete any member data they may have retained and we will conduct audits to confirm that it has been deleted," the company said in a statement.
"We've removed or restricted a number of our developer APIs, such as the Groups API, which provides an interface between Facebook and apps that can integrate with a group," it added.Facebook is facing scrutiny after personal data of 87 million users were harvested by UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has slapped Facebook with a $5 billion fine as a result of the breach.
According to the company, the apps designed to make it easier for group admins to manage their groups more effectively and help members share videos to their groups."For example, if a business managed a large community consisting of many members across multiple groups, they could use a social media management app to provide customer service, including customized responses, at scale."

"But while this access provided benefits to people and groups on Facebook, we made the decision to remove it and are following through on that approach," said Facebook.According to Facebook's director of platform partnerships, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, the new framework under their agreement with the FTC means more accountability and transparency into how it builds and maintains products.....READ MORE

Why is Dubai trying to put its real estate sector in the reverse gear?

International News
The desert gave Dubai an easy excuse to keep building.
Sprawling for miles in every direction from the dueling skyscrapers on the coast, villa communities have sprung up across the sandy interior, bringing with them schools, hospitals and shopping malls. Where the dunes once spilled into the Persian Gulf, an eight-lane highway now connects the new developments with the established neighborhoods.
But five years into Dubai’s property funk, the emirate’s leadership is drawing the line.
Work on a mega-airport, designed to be one of the world’s biggest, was put on hold. And in the most dramatic U-turn yet, Dubai’s ruler has created a committee, headed by his son, to balance out supply and demand in the property market and ensure that state-owned developers don’t crowd out private builders.Some developers are already holding off on planned projects. Two of Dubai’s homegrown billionaires are now calling for a pause to new development. Khalaf Al Habtoor, who once added 1,600 hotel rooms to the city through one project, said the market is saturated.
“If this oversupply continues it will be a disaster,” Hussain Sajwani, chairman of Damac Properties PJSC, said in an interview. “The banking system will get affected and that’s something we can’t afford.”
Blame Game
Much of the property glut is of the government’s own making, since it controls some of the emirate’s biggest developers. The state-linked firms, created to speed up construction, used cheap and often free land to compete for buyers. Some paid upfront without waiting for homes to be completed by depositing only 5% of the value.

And excessively optimistic projections of growth in Dubai’s population, which consists largely of foreigners, only fed the building boom.....READ MORE

WhatsApp snooping: Here's how you can still communicate securely

International News
Since the revelations about the Pegasus spyware having been used to snoop on more than a hundred Indians, many are justifiably worried.
You may think that if you are doing things that the government or powerful interests may not like, then it may seem like all the more reason to arrive at the decision that because you cannot do anything about the snooping, it is best to stop using your phone or stop communication altogether.
Some may feel equally justified in reaching the conclusion that you should forget about security and go about your business seeing that you cannot protect yourself any way.It is true that it is very, very hard to protect yourself against a hack like this. Perhaps not with Pegasus, which has probably run aground, but other hacks of this kind will most likely occur again.
But that does not mean you should give up on either communicating, or on communicating securely.Because the reality is that while you may not be able stop an attack like this, you can do a lot to mitigate surveillance in general. And if you do that, you will also mitigate the consequences, should you suffer a Pegasus style attack.
Let’s start by noting that attacks like Pegasus, by their very nature, are rarely conducted against large numbers of targets.Some have noted that Pegasus is very expensive, but that is not the fundamental reason.
Pegasus is a targeted individual hack that seeks to break the protections built into computer and phone operating systems. All hacks like this follow the same method. They rely on finding what are known as “zero day vulnerabilities”, namely bugs in a software that even the developer does not know about (hence “zero day”, as in zero days of warning).

This bug is then used to infiltrate the operating system of the phone or computer, and from there to monitor and attack other software. Use of zero days makes Pegasus-style attacks almost impossible to stop in advance....READ MORE

Uber puts brakes on growth at any cost strategy and investors will be happy

International News
Uber Technologies Inc seems to have decided to stop chasing stupid growth. This is exactly what investors wanted, yet the company’s latest results, announced on Monday, show how far Uber has to go to be sustainable and rational.
In the third quarter, the total value of Uber rides, restaurant meal deliveries and other transactions increased 29% from a year earlier — the slowest rate of increase since Uber began reporting that figure. The total figure of $16.5 billion was also a little short of analysts’ expectations, as was the growth in average monthly customers using Uber services at least once. That most likely contributed to the after-market decline in Uber shares.
What Uber seems to be doing is precisely what investors want now. The company is trying to stop growing where it doesn’t make sense. Third-quarter revenue from rides, excluding what Uber classifies as excessive driver incentives and driver referrals, increased 23% in the quarter, rebounding from a growth slowdown. The adjusted revenue growth for Uber Eats, the restaurant delivery service, also accelerated.
The divergence between slowing growth in total transactions and a faster pace of revenue in crucial segments suggests that Uber has increased consumer prices, reduced incentives or made other tweaks to keep more revenue from each ride or food delivery — even if that means some people are turned off enough not to use Uber at all. This is rational, yes, but acting like a sensible company may also crimp Uber’s eventual size and ambition.
Uber also said it’s aiming to have positive adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation in 2021. That is far earlier than analysts have expected Uber to be profitable — or profitable-ish. Lyft made a similar pledge last month to be in the green by the end of 2021 on a massaged profit number that excludes stock compensation and some other costs.
It’s useful to step back and see how much has changed for Uber, Lyft and other young and richly-valued companies. Ever since these companies went public in the first half of this year, Uber and Lyft have been forced to shift gears and chase profits, or some semblance of them, rather than boasting about how big they can grow if they swallow more of people’s current spending on transportation.

This is the new normal for young companies like Uber: Investors want them to grow, but not if the growth is achieved with unsustainable spending or rash financial trade-offs. There in the penalty box is WeWork, the office leasing startup that did exactly that.READ MORE

Govts tend to suppress data when it is on shaky grounds: Joseph Stiglitz

International News
Joseph Stiglitz, 76, gently placed his walking stick beside the sofa and a stack of papers on the table as he settled in to savour some South Indian breakfast. He was in the city to deliver a lecture organised by a university.
It has been almost three decades since India liberalised and integrated with the global economy. It was the seventh largest economy in the world by gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018. But this growth has slowed, and is expected to shrink further in 2019-20, according to multiple global institutions.
“The data that I have seen reinforces very strong concerns [about the economy],” Stiglitz told IndiaSpend in the course of an interview. “I do not know anybody who is not in the government who is not worried.” Governments tend to “suppress data when it is on shaky grounds”, he added.
While India has been able to benefit from globalisation, there is a view that is “not an uncommon view but an unpleasant one”, that in a regulated market like India foreign players “have a disadvantage because the insiders know how to play the game”.Stiglitz won the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the US from 1993-95, during the Bill Clinton administration, and its chairperson from 1995-97. Between 1997 and 2000, he served as chief economist and senior vice-president of the World Bank.

Stiglitz has authored multiple books on economics including People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent; Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump; and The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. In 2011, he was among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He is a professor in the department of economics at Columbia University and founder and president of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think-tank on international development based at the university...READ MORE

Burger King India to file for Rs 1,000-crore IPO this week: Details here

The logo of Burger King is seen outside a shop in Vienna in Vienna, Austria, October 1, 2016. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger/File Photo

International News
Burger King India, a major player in the domestic quick service restaurant (QSR) space, will file a document for an initial public offer (IPO) this week with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), said people with direct knowledge of the development.
The issue will comprise a secondary share sale worth Rs 600 crore by private equity major Everstone Capital and fresh fundraising worth Rs 400 crore, which will be used to fuel the burger chain’s expansion plan.
Assuming the regulatory approval process takes the usual time, Burger King India would list early next year, joining rivals Jubilant FoodWorks (operator of the Domino’s Pizza chain) and Westlife Development (master franchisee of McDonald’s in the western and southern markets) in going public. Typically, Sebi takes between four and six weeks to vet and clear an IPO document.Everstone owns and operates Burger King’s branded restaurants across India and Indonesia, as part of its food and beverage Asia portfolio. Everstone has invested in more than 30 portfolio companies in the consumer and consumer-led sectors across India and Southeast Asia.
Investment bankers said taking Burger King India public was part of Everstone’s strategy to liquidate its investment. In May, Everstone-backed non-banking financial company IndoStar Capital Finance had raised Rs 1,844 crore through an IPO. In 2017, the PE firm's education sector-focused publishing company S. Chand and Co got listed in a Rs 729-crore IPO. An email sent to Everstone seeking comment remained unanswered.

Edelweiss, Kotak Mahindra Capital, JM Financial, and CLSA are the investment bankers managing the Burger King IPO.Market players said Burger King India could command attractive valuations, given the investor preference for consumer-oriented brands. Also, the listed QSR players trade at lofty price-to-earnings multiples. Jubilant Foodworks now trades at 51 times its estimated one-year forward earnings....READ MORE

Aramco hungry for IPO success with Crown Prince's vision 2030 at stake

International News
Saudi Arabia is pulling out all the stops to ensure the success of Aramco’s initial public offering after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman finally decided to offer shares in the world’s largest oil producer.
The kingdom cut taxes on the company for a third time, revealed incentives for investors not to sell and is considering boosting dividends further. Yet the Saudi government has already conceded the company probably isn’t worth the $2 trillion valuation Prince Mohammed has long advocated.More than three years after the IPO was first mooted, Aramco published a so-called intention to float on Sunday, the most dramatic change to the Saudi oil industry since the company was nationalized in the 1970s. The IPO is a cornerstone of Prince Mohammed’s Vision 2030 plan to make the Saudi economy ready for the post-oil era.
Saudi Arabia is aiming for a valuation of between $1.6 trillion and $1.8 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter. Analysts at banks working on the deal offered wildly diverging estimates: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. told investors Aramco is worth between $1.6 trillion and $2.3 trillion. Bank of America, another top bank on the deal, had the bottom of its range at just $1.2 trillion. BNP gave an estimate of $1.42 trillion.“This is the right time for us,” Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan said at a news conference at Aramco’s headquarters in the eastern city of Dhahran on Sunday.

Aramco’s net income last year of $111 billion made it the most profitable of any corporation -- more than Apple Inc., Google’s parent Alphabet Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp. combined -- but the company has pledged to pay a minimum of $75 billion in dividends, leaving it vulnerable to a downturn in oil prices.Most of the banks valuations are based on oil prices staying above $60 a barrel and assume Aramco will be able to raise oil production by 2021. Almost every bank assumes Aramco will need to take debt this year and next year to cover spending and dividend payments. JPMorgan Chase & Co. published a 118-page report without offering a valuation, but called Aramco the first “mega-major” oil company....READ MORE