Facebook has revealed its solution for allowing people to anonymously gossip with one another online: internet chat rooms.

The social network said its Rooms app for iOS lets netizens connect on shared interests and use pseudonyms in order to hide their identities from each other. Just like IRC.

Whisper is not a place for illegal activity. If we receive a valid legal request, or we learn that you tried to use Whisper to post content that exposes imminent danger to yourself or others, we will share the limited information we have, including IP address, with the appropriate authorities.

To cite another example, if a user claims to be a health care professional concerned about Ebola, we may review their recent posts to help assess the authenticity of the Whisper before featuring it.

The company behind Whisper, the social media app that promises users anonymity and claims to be “the safest place on the internet”, is tracking the location of its users, including some who have specifically asked not to be followed.

But on Monday – four days after learning the Guardian intended to publish this story – Whisper rewrote its terms of service; they now explicitly permit the company to establish the broad location of people who have disabled the app’s geolocation feature.

User data, including Whisper postings that users believe they have deleted, is collated in a searchable database.

Whisper has an offshore base in the Philippines, where more than 100 employees screen messages 24 hours a day.

The filing comes from VPN company Golden Frog and discusses "two recent examples that show that users are not receiving the open, neutral, and uninterrupted service to which the Commission says they are entitled."

This broadband provider is overwriting the content of users’ communications and actively blocking STARTTLS encryption. This is a man-in-the-middle attack that prevents customers from using the applications of their choosing and directly prevents users from protecting their privacy.

Explicit images believed to have been sent through messaging service Snapchat were reportedly put online, with threats from hackers to upload more.

Snapchat is a messaging app that allows the sharing of videos and images that "disappear" after a short period of time, usually just a few seconds.

At the start of this year, 4.6m usernames and phone numbers were leaked online. More recently, the service has been suffering from spam messages being sent out from users' accounts without their knowledge.

Splunk, a young data platform that stands to become a hugely important factor in gauging the Internet of things, held its fifth annual users and partners conference here Oct. 6 to 9.

The San Francisco-based company ostensibly will become a kingpin player in indexing, monitoring and making usable the scads of data that the IoT will foist upon us in the coming years because it knows how to classify data, and do it fast.

At this point, it's all too predictable that when anyone in power is getting ready to take away your rights, they'll figure out a way to claim that it's "for the children!" The statements over the past week by law enforcement, Comey and now Holder are clearly a coordinated attack -- the start of the new crypto wars (a repeat of what we went through a decade and a half ago), designed to pass some laws that effectively cripple encryption and put backdoors in place.

For years it's been looking to do things like reopen wiretapping statutes like CALEA and mandate wiretap backdoors into all sorts of technology.

He offers “people-based marketing,” that is, marketing based on Facebook’s data, as the solution.

Instagram, which of course, is owned by Facebook, is also enabled with Atlas. The company noted in its announcement that advertisers who buy ads on Facebook, Atlas, and Instagram will be able to easily compare the results.

Backlash against Facebook’s existing data collection policies is what has been recently fueling the growth of Ello, a Facebook competitor that vows never to sell user data.

Facebook enabled videos to automatically play by default, which has caused many people to incur high data usage charges.

“We’ve seen many complaints from people who have been stung with data bills after exceeding their monthly allowance and who believe it to be because of Facebook autoplaying videos,” reported MoneySavingExpert.com.

"Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook," Zuck's representative said.

... but eBay was down as well! Some users reported difficulty logging into their accounts, and in some cases the online auction site reportedly told them their accounts didn't even exist.

So Tumblr, then? Maybe we could kill the next half-hour by perusing a few celebrity photo blogs? No such luck.