On certain days, I dream. I dream that all viruses will disappear, all people will learn to dance and at least some tech companies will embrace (relative) honesty as a guiding light. Today isn't one of those days, as I must contemplate Facebook, the ill-shaped birthmark on tech's barely hirsute visage.

Still smarting from last month's dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a massive scale, links Facebook accounts with their associated email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public.

Facebook does not need any more bad publicity. The company is currently being publicly scorned after more than 500 million users had their personal information leaked. It has also been faced with an antitrust suit endorsed by more than 40 states since last year, with reports alleging that CEO Mark Zuckerberg would intimidate potential competitors.

Facebook has removed more than 16,000 groups trading fake reviews after the UK’s competition regulator criticised the company for failing to make good on a previous promise to clamp down on the practice.

Facebook will not notify the more than half a billion people caught up in a huge leak of personal information, it has said. Over the weekend, it emerged that a vast trove of data on more than 530 million users – containing information including their phone numbers and dates of birth – was being made freely available online.

A Supreme Court ruling today in favor of Facebook limits the reach of a 1991 US law that bans certain kinds of robocalls and texts. The court found that the anti-robocall law only applies to systems that have the ability to generate random or sequential phone numbers. Systems that lack that capability are thus not considered autodialers under the law, even if they can store numbers and send calls and texts automatically.

If you catch your old college roommate sharing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Facebook, the odds are that these falsehoods are coming from one of twelve people. That’s right. Just twelve individuals. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Vax Watch found that up to 65 percent of “anti-vaccine content” on Facebook and Twitter originated from twelve influencers within the anti-vaxxer movement.

Facebook’s bullying and harassment policy explicitly allows for “public figures” to be targeted in ways otherwise banned on the site, including “calls for [their] death”, according to a tranche of internal moderator guidelines leaked to the Guardian.

A federal judge denied Google's motion to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the search giant of tracking users even while they were using incognito mode on their browsers. The suit, Brown v. Google, alleged that Google collected data when users were using Chrome's private browsing mode. In some instances, other websites that used Google Analytics or Google Ad Manager sent "a secrete, separate message to Google's servers in California," the suit said.

Facebook has been accused of using nondisclosure agreements to try to build a “wall of secrecy” and prevent its moderators from discussing working conditions with Leo Varadkar, the Irish tánaiste (deputy PM).

Kanye West faces two class action suits and up to $30 million in penalties, allegedly failing to pay up to 1,000 performers and crew members of his Sunday Service Shows. According to Page Six, the cases were filed in Los Angeles last summer and are split between the performers and the crew: Frank Kim has more than 500 performers, while Harris & Ruble’s lawyers have more than 300 crew members, according to the outlet sources.

Facebook has been ordered to pay €3.83 million (around $4.72 million) in damages to an Italian developer over the social network’s “Nearby” feature. Reuters reports that the Milan-based appeals court upheld a 2019 ruling saying Facebook had copied the feature from developer Business Competence’s Faround app.

Amid a barrage of public attacks on Apple from Facebook over privacy measures, Facebook employees have expressed their displeasure with the direction of the campaign in comments obtained by BuzzFeed News. Last week, Facebook launched a campaign in print newspapers explaining that it was "standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere," and created a website encouraging people to "Speak Up for Small Businesses."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s adopted hometown of San Francisco took the first step on Thursday to formally condemn the naming of a major hospital after him and his wife, the latest flashpoint in the debate over the proper role for billionaire philanthropy.

Facebook is facing perhaps its greatest existential threat yet as the company prepares to battle two antitrust lawsuits brought by the US government and more than 40 states. But while analysts are calling the crackdown an important step, whether the social media giant can be reined in remains to be seen.

After her home in Santa Rosa, Calif., burned down in the Tubbs fire three years ago, Linda Adrain moved into a tiny apartment. She didn’t expect to stay long. Adrain soon learned about plans for a complex for low-income senior citizens on the site of the fire-ravaged mobile home park where she had lived for a quarter-century. She quickly signed up for a two-bedroom apartment.

Facebook has brought its might down upon a small but scrappy academic team who've done brilliant work in exposing the company's failures to contain scams, rip-offs, and political disinformation. If the team doesn’t fully dismantle its public-interest research project and delete its data by November 30, Facebook says, it “may be subject to additional enforcement action.” Why? Because the $775 billion company wants to protect our privacy.

Deep in the Amazon Rainforest of Ecuador lies the "Amazon Chernobyl", a 1,700-square-mile environmental disaster brought on by oil extraction and production. After a visit to Ecuador in 1993, human rights lawyer Steven Donziger and other attorneys brought a class-action lawsuit against Texaco (later Chevron) on behalf of over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people from this Amazon region who were affected by this disaster. Through his personal testimony and supporting footage, Steven recounts his experience advocating on behalf of the environment and affected communities and the personal toll this work has had on his life.

The bizarre, pro-Trump cult known as QAnon has been gaining followers in the United States for months. Now, the conspiracy theory has begun spreading to Germany. It's followers believe that the coronavirus is a weapon of the elite in their quest to enslave the world.

Facebook has threatened to pack up its toys and go home if European regulators don’t back down and let the social network get its own way. In a court filing in Dublin, Facebook said that a decision by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) would force the company to pull up stakes and leave the 410 million people who use Facebook and photo-sharing service Instagram in the lurch.