Facebook roundup: Home privacy, stock price, hackathon and open source project

Facebook addresses privacy questions about Home - Facebook today shared its answers to common privacy questions users might have about Home, the social network's latest development for Android. Home is optional software that makes Facebook features more integrated into a user's device. The company says it does not have any of a user's privacy settings and that all data collected by the service is covered by Facebook's existing Data Use Policy. Home collects information about how people use the service, such as whether they Like a photo, send a message or launch an app. That information is stored for 90 days in order for Facebook to understand how people are responding to the app and how it could be improved. Facebook says Home does not treat location information any differently than the existing Facebook app. Users can also turn off location services completely. More about Home and privacy is available here. Facebook stock up after Home announcement - Facebook shares closed at $27.39 this week, up 7 percent since Monday. The stock hasn't been above $27 per share since March 14. Shares fell beneath $26 earlier in the week as rumors swirled about whether Facebook was launching its own phone or developing a modified version of Android. Wall Street seemed pleased with the company's decision to release software that could run on a number of devices to make them more social, while also partnering with HTC, AT&T and others to ensure that Home comes preloaded on some new phones. Facebook, Gates Foundation to sponsor hackathon - Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are partnering to organize HackEd, two hackathon events this month to address problems in education. Developers will build Facebook-integrated tools for "social learning," "out-of-school study" and "college-going." One event will be at Facebook HQ in California April 9. The other will be its London offices April 24. Winners could take home up to $5,000. This is the second year Facebook and the Gates Foundation have put on this event. Last year it was in California only. Facebook open sources benchmarking tool - Facebook this week released LinkBench, an open source tool for benchmarking graph databases. LinkBench allows developers to replicate the data model, graph structure and request mix of Facebook's own MySQL workload, while being customizable and extensible for their specific needs. Tim Armstrong, computer science PhD candidate who led the project during an internship at Facebook, said, "We also believe that the broader community working on databases and social applications can benefit from a realistic benchmark for storage and retrieval of social network and other graph-structured data. These applications place many unique demands on database infrastructure due to rapid growth, large volumes of data, and rich data models, yet there are few benchmarks that test performance for these workloads." LinkBench is available on GitHub.

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Facebook roundup: Home privacy, stock price, hackathon and open source project

Brittany Darwell

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Brittany Darwell