About a month after buying all that engagement, the research team looked at the status of all those fake accounts and found that about 80 percent were still active. So they reported a sample selection of those accounts to the platforms as fraudulent. Then came the most damning statistic: three weeks after being reported as fake, 95 percent of the fake accounts were still active.

TikTok, the fast-growing social network from China, has used unusual measures to protect supposedly vulnerable users. The platform instructed its moderators to mark videos of people with disabilities and limit their reach. Queer and fat people also ended up on a list of „special users“.

Moderators were instructed to mark people with disabilities as „Risk 4“. This means that a video is only visible in the country where it was uploaded.

Asking for a date of birth would help the company to avoid targeting ads for age-restricted products at children, the Reuters news agency reported.

"Asking for this information will help prevent underage people from joining Instagram, help us keep young people safer and enable more age-appropriate experiences overall," the company said in a blog post.

Tensions have increased as Google has cracked down on what had long been a freewheeling work culture that encouraged employees to speak out. Google recently canceled a regular series of companywide meetings that allowed workers to pose questions to senior executives and began working with a consulting firm that has helped companies quell unionization efforts.

The Tech Workers Coalition, an advocacy group, said on Twitter on Monday that the four employees had been fired for “organizing at work” and encouraged workers at Google to “speak out against this draconian act.”

The fact that there wasn’t a discussion outside the confines of the boards of ISOC and PIR – the outfit that manages the registry and is wholly owned by ISOC – was very deliberate, many feel. If there had been a discussion, they argue, the internet community would never have allowed it to happen.

Then came the news that ISOC had decided to sell the registry to Ethos Capital, an unknown private equity firm that had been established only months earlier.

It quickly became apparent that Ethos Capital was likely the brainchild of a former CEO of ICANN, Fadi Chehade, who had been largely responsible for pushing free-market economics into the internet registry market and now appeared to be using that knowledge to profit from one of its oldest institutions.

Konrad Dantas, better known as Kondzilla, has seen his YouTube music videos watched more than 26 billion times.

The 31-year-old Brazilian set up his business in 2011, and it also includes a record label.

They are among thousands of organisations and individuals concerned about the sale of the Public Internet Registry (PIR), which runs .org.

PIR was sold last week for an undisclosed sum to private equity firm Ethos Capital.

Ethos Capital said it was "committed to keeping .org accessible and reasonably priced for all".

While the collection is impressive for its sheer volume, the data doesn't include sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers. It does, though, contain profiles of hundreds of millions of people that include home and cell phone numbers, associated social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github, work histories seemingly scraped from LinkedIn, almost 50 million unique phone numbers, and 622 million unique email addresses.

“The owner of this server likely used one of our enrichment products, along with a number of other data-enrichment or licensing services," says Sean Thorne, cofounder of People Data Labs. "Once a customer receives data from us, or any other data providers, the data is on their servers and the security is their responsibility. We perform free security audits, consultations, and workshops with the majority of our customers."

Instead of only competing on the checkout page against credit cards or Apple Pay, for example, PayPal will leap ahead to become a part of the deal discovery process, as well.

Currently, Honey’s 17 million monthly active users take advantage of its suite of money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers and participate in an Ebates-like rewards program called Honey Gold.

Facebook released a blog post in September explaining that even if users opt out of letting Facebook collect their data, it could still determine users’ locations in other ways, like through check-ins and users’ internet connections.

The senators asked Zuckerberg to explain how Facebook collects data from users when their location settings are limited or turned off for their app. They also asked Facebook to share whether it uses location data it collects while users have turned off or restricted location services to target ads or share with third parties.