The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on "the generosity of individual donors" rather than ads.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Mr Wales described the advertising-led business model favoured by the social network giants as "problematic".

This nasty piece of mobile malware cleverly hides itself on Android devices while serving up a host of advertisements: full-page ads, ads delivered when opening the default browser, ads in the notifications, and even ads via home screen widget. All while, ironically, posing as an ad blocker vaguely named Ads Blocker.

Ads Blocker is inordinately hard to find on the mobile device once installed. To start, there is no icon for Ads Blocker. However, there are some hints of its existence, for example, a small key icon status bar.

Instagram tells TechCrunch the hidden Likes test is expanding to a subset of people globally. Users will have to decide for themselves if something is worth Liking rather than judging by the herd.

The expansion raises concerns that the test could hurt influencers and creators after a study by HypeAuditor found many of them of various levels of popularity lost 3% to 15% of their Likes in countries where Instagram hid the counts.

Instagram also has the U.S. government on its side for a change. While its parent company Facebook is being investigated for antitrust and privacy violations, TikTok is also under scrutiny.

Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s $1 billion 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, another Chinese app similar to TikTok but with traction in the U.S., is under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

Some politicians are worried the app's Chinese owner, Bytedance, poses a risk to national security.

Others worry about the fact China requires its social-media apps to provide the state access to users' information.

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome.

"Unsurprisingly, our work on DoH [DNS over HTTPS] has prompted a campaign to forestall these privacy and security protections, as demonstrated by the recent letter to Congress from major telecommunications associations. That letter contained a number of factual inaccuracies," Mozilla Senior Director of Trust and Security Marshall Erwin wrote.

The blurb comes as part of Google's effort to convince hostile police agencies and legislators around the world that DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) won't result in ordinary people's internet usage being completely shielded from the ability of state agencies and ISPs to monitor and police them – the snoops will just have to work harder to eavesdrop on folks. In contrast, Mozilla, maker of Firefox, has vowed to press on and redirect users' DNS queries to its preferred host, Cloudflare, if it is so enabled.

The BBC has launched a .onion version of its news website on the Tor anonymising network aimed at readers based in countries that ban its services.

"Today, the network has thousands of relays run by volunteers and millions of users worldwide. And it is this diversity that keeps Tor users safe."

The decision follows from the German Federation of Consumer Organizations' challenge of German company Planet49's use of a pre-ticked checkbox to obtain permission to place cookies on the devices of players of its online lottery game.

The CJEU ruling underscores the need for online businesses to conform with Europe's cookie requirements, which direct websites to obtain consent before placing cookies. And it serves as a warning shot for website operators.

The proposed change was supposed to make the ID check more rigorous and help weed out impersonators.

Instead, the change was seen as stripping established YouTubers of their standing and hobbling their chances to prosper on the video site.

The threatened removal prompted widespread protests by established YouTubers, many of whom said the verification mark helped them establish their authority and longevity on the site.