Technology

Ahead of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testifying before Congress later today, where she will be questioned alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorseyas US lawmakers wrestle with how to regulate social media platforms (and even just to get bums on seats, given GoogleLarry Page declined to attend), the Pew Research Center has published new research suggesting Americans have become more cautious and critical in their use of Facebook over the past year.

Itcertainly been a year of scandals for the social media behemoth, which started 2018 already on the back foot already in the wake of Kremlin-backed election interference revelations — and with Mark Zuckerberg saying his annual personal mission for the new year would be the embarrassingly unfun challenge of &fixing Facebook&.

Since then things have only got worse, with a major global scandal kicking off in March after fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica data misuse sandal snowballed and went on to drag all sorts of other data malfeasance skeletons out of Facebookcloset.

‘Locking down the platform& is the new ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted&.

All of which led Zuckerberg to be perched on a booster cushion in the Senate and Congress, where he was berated by US lawmakers for dodging their questions. (Lawmakers in Europe berated him for avoiding their questions too.)

So if US Facebook users are changing how they use the platform as a result of all this scandalabra ithardly surprising (or only if you believe the lie Zuckerberg has fenced for years that people don&t care about privacy).

Pew sees evidence of a change in US users& relationship with the service, noting that many users have adjusted privacy settings (52%); taken a break from Facebook of at least a few weeks(42%); while around a quarter (26%) said they had deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone.

All told, it said that almost three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users told it they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year.

Most worryingly for Facebook, it found differences in the reaction of users depending on their age — with younger users (18 to 29) by far the most likely to say they had deleted the Facebook app in the past year.

So privacy alive and kicking among the young then — not, er, dead.

Similarly, Pew found that older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months: Only a third of users 65 and older have done this vs a full 64% of younger users.

It also found that onlyaround one-in-ten Facebook users (9%) have downloaded the personal data about them available on Facebook — a possibility which was given extra publicity by Zuckerbergtestimony to US lawmakers.

Despite this group representing a relatively small slice as a share of the Facebook population, Pew couches these users as &highly privacy-conscious& — saying roughly half (47%) of the users who have downloaded their personal data from Facebook have deleted the app from their cellphone, while 79% have elected to adjust their privacy settings.

Ergo it looks like awareness of data risks strengthens pro-privacy behavior among users. Who&d have thought it!

Pew&sstudy was carried out between May 29 and June 11, 2018 — so well after the Cambridge Analytica scandal had snowballed into a major PR crisis for Facebook — with the research firm polling more than 4,500 respondents

A separate Pew study, also conducted at the same time and published today, suggests many US users don&t understand how FacebookNews Feed works.

The survey found that ¬able shares& of Facebook users ages 18 and older lack a clear understanding of how the siteNews Feed operates; feel they have little control over what appears there; and have not actively tried to influence the content the feed delivers to them.

When asked whether they understand why certain posts but not others are included in their news feed, around half of U.S. adults who use Facebook (53%) say they do not — with a fifth (20%) saying they do not understand the feed at all well.

Older users are especially likely to say they do not understand the workings of the News Feed: Just 38% of Facebook users ages 50 and older say they have a good understanding of why certain posts are included in it vs 59% of users ages 18 to 29.

While Facebook offers some tools for users to control what they see in the Feed, such as by giving priority to certain people or hiding posts from others,Pew found that just 14% of Facebook users believe ordinary users have a lot of control over the content that appears there & and twice that share (28%) said they felt they have no control.

Older Facebook users in particular feel they have little agency in this regard: Some 37% of Facebook users 50 and older think users have no control over their News Feed, roughly double the share among users ages 18 to 49 (20%), Pew also found.

The existence of user controls on Facebookplatform was a factor that Zuckerberg deferred to multiple times during his testimony to lawmakers earlier this year, claiming for example that Facebook users have &complete control& over how their information is used as a result of the settings the platform offers them.

Whatever the truth of the substance of that claim, many Facebook users clearly feel they have little control over what they are exposed to on the service — which in turn undermines the companyclaims that it puts its users in the driving seat when it comes to data (be that how their own data is used, or what other data the service exposes them to).

The lack of transparency around algorithmically controlled content platforms is likely to be a key theme in the Senate Select Intelligence Committeequestioning of the social media execs later today. (More for how to watch the hearings here.)

We&ve reached out to Facebook for comment on Pewresearch.

Snapchat isn&t revealing sales numbers of version 2 of its Spectacles camera sunglasses, but at least they&re not getting left in a drawer as much as the V1s. The company tells me V2 owners are capturing 40 percent more Snaps than people with V1s.

And today, Snapchat is launching two new black-rimmed hipster styles of Spectacles V2 — a Wayfarer-esque Nico model and a glamorous big-lensed Veronica model. Both come with a slimmer semi-soft black carrying case instead of the chunky old triangular yellow one, and are polarized for the first time. They look a lot more like normal sunglasses, compared to the jokey, bubbly V1s, so they could appeal to a more mature and fashionable audience. They go on sale today for $199 in the US and Europe and will be sold in Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom later this year, while the old styles remain $149.

The new Spectacles styles (from left): Veronica and Nico

Spectacles V2 original style (left) and V1 (right)

Snap is also trying to get users to actually post what they capture, so itplanning an automatically curated Highlight Story feature that will help you turn your best Specs content into great things to share. That could address the problem common amongst GoPro users of shooting a ton of cool footage but never editing it for display.

The problem is that V1 were pretty exceedingly unpopular, and those that did buy them. Snap only shipped 220,000 pairs and reportedly had hundreds of thousands more gathering dust in a warehouse. It took a $40 million write-off and its hardware &camera company& strategy was called into question. Business Insider reported that less than 50 percent of buyers kept using them after a month and a &sizeable& percentage stopped after just a week.

The new styles come with a slimmer semi-soft carry case

That means the bar was pretty low from which to score a 40 percent increase in usage, especially given the V2s take photos, work underwater, come in a slimmer charging case, and lack the V1s& bright yellow ring around the camera lens that announces you&re wearing a mini computer on your face. Snap was smart to finally let you export in non-circular formats which are useful for sharing beyond Snapchat, and let you automatically save Snaps to your camera roll and not just its appMemories feature.

I&ve certainly been using my V2s much more than the V1s since they&re more discrete and versatile. And I haven&t encountered as much fear or anxiety from people worried about being filmed as privacy norms around technology continue to relax.

But even with the improved hardware, new styles, and upcoming features, Spectacles V2 don&t look like they&re moving the needle for Snapchat. After shrinking in user count last quarter, Snapshare price has fallen to just a few cents above its all-time low. Given most of its users are cash-strapped teens who aren&t going to buy Spectacles even if they&re cool, the company needs to focus on how to make its app for everyone more useful and differentiated after the invasion of Instagramcopy-cats of its Stories and ephemeral messaging.

Whether that means securing tentpole premium video content for Discover, redesigning Stories to ditch the interstitials for better lean-back viewing, or developing augmented reality games, Snap can&t stay the course. Despite its hardware ambitions, itfundamentally a software company. It has to figure out what makes that software special.

Experiences, not cash, are the new corporate bonus. At least, according to Airbnb.

With that mantra in mind, the $31 billion company is expanding the part of its business that targets business travelers, called Airbnb for Work. The new effort will help them tap into a large market they&ve been missing out on—non-travelers.

Airbnb is adding three new features. The first addition allows businesses to use Airbnb Experiences, the part of the app or website where travelers can book tours or events for their vacations, to arrange team-building activities, like sailing lessons or pastry-making classes. The second makes some of the homes available on Airbnb for corporate off-sites and meetings. And the final new feature lets employers secure temporary housing for employees relocating forwork.

&In todayhyper-competitive talent environment, once you&ve recruited great employees, you want to keep them,& the company wrote in todayannouncement.&The spaces where people spend time away from the office make a big difference. Sterile conference rooms aren&t motivating and don&t foster creativity. However, relaxing and productive environments help people open up to connect and contribute; they help teams achieve their shared goals more effectively.&

Airbnb for Work has proven to be quite the money-making endeavor since its 2014 launch as &Airbnb for Business,& and nowaccounts for 15% of its bookings. It saw 3x growth in bookings from 2015 to 2016 and again from 2016 to 2017. 700,000 companies have used the service to plan business travel.

Airbnb has been busy expanding its platform this year. Last month, it integrated Airbnb listings into Concursearch and booking tool in what was the first time it linked up with a corporate travel platform. A few months before that, it established a new tier specifically for high-end customers called Airbnb Plus and Beyond by Airbnb.

The hospitality powerhouse is expected to hit the public markets as soon as June 30, 2019.Slowly, ittaking the steps necessary to IPO, like creating a bonus program that will provide cash bonuses to employees in 2018 and 2019 and poaching an Amazon executive to lead its homes unit.