This Week in Tech: Facebook’s Cofounder Calls for a Break Up

It was an interesting week for tech news – Facebook’s CEO was blasted by an old friend in The New York Times while the folks at Google put on their biggest conference of the year. In case you missed anything, here’s a breakdown of the stories that our B2B tech teams were paying attention to:

Cofounder wants Facebook to be broken up

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for breaking up the tech giants. Well, the hits keep coming for Mr. Zuckerberg, as Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes has now wrote a strongly worded New York Times op-ed arguing that the social media giant should be divided into three separate companies (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp). According to Hughes, Zuckerberg’s focus on growth has “led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks.”

Combating the security skills shortage

Companies are struggling to fill hundreds of thousands of open cybersecurity jobs throughout the U.S. – a concerning and well documented trend that impacts many of our clients in the space. According to a new piece in The Wall Street Journal, employers like IBM and Palo Alto Networks are investing millions in order to figure out a solution. This includes new partnerships with universities, training programs and cool competitions that will hopefully attract the right talent. For example, videogame-like simulations of computer networks containing hidden data to recruit new hires.

Instagram to start policing anti-vaccine content

The big social networks have been trying out a number of ways to block harmful content for a while now, and this one is pretty interesting. Instagram is planning on hiding search results for hashtags that consistently return false information about vaccines, leveraging machine learning to understand which ones to block.

Google combats Apple’s privacy FUD

At this week’s I/O developer conference, Google fought back against Apple’s privacy FUD-focused marketing tactics (check out this great recap on VentureBeat for the full rundown). During his keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai made the case for sharing small amounts of personal data for larger, common goods. An interesting debate, which I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of.

Pro tip

Depending on what industries your clients are involved in, this week would’ve been a tough one for a smaller-scale press announcement (Uber’s upcoming IPO and Google I/O, plus the continual drama at Facebook, have taken up a lot of attention). Here’s some advice on how to time these announcements so that your news won’t be buried.