Facebook pulls personal data-sharing feature
Fear not for your privacy, Facebook friends. Facebook has made a u-turn on its decision to share users’ addresses and mobile phone numbers to developers. Just before the weekend, the largest social networking site on the face of the planet announced that it had expanded the information users are able to share with external websites and applications, to include home addresses and mobile phone numbers (which you are haven’t even shared to your next door neighbor yet and you’ve been neighbors for 10 years!)
This enables developers of e.g. an ecommerce site to more easily fetch the address and phone number of a potential customer to streamline the checkout process. Currently, developers can access this information only with explicit permission from the user.
Now, after a barrage of criticism, the company decided to disable the feature. Facebook announced that it has temporarily disabled the sharing feature, looking to relaunch it in the next few weeks after making some changes.
“Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks,” Douglas Purdy, director of developer relations, posted on the Facebook developer blog.
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Scientists to attempt bringing back to life the woolly mammoth
The last ice age wiped out the Woolly Mammoths about 12,000 years ago. But they might be coming back from extinction… maybe. A team of researchers from Russia, Japan and the United States will attempt to resurrect the species using new, advanced cloning technologies on discovered viable tissue from a frozen mammoth carcass in Siberia. The mammoth is preserved in a Russian mammoth research laboratory. The lab has already established a technique to extract DNA from frozen cells — having successfully cloned a mouse from DNA frozen in ice for 16 years.
To do this, the scientists will insert the nuclei of the dead mammoth cells into an elephant’s egg cells from which the elephant nuclei have been removed to create an embryo containing mammoth genes. The embryo will then be inserted into an elephant’s womb in the hope that the animal will give birth to a baby mammoth. Yes, that’s a surrogate mom for the baby mammoth for you. The team said if everything goes as planned, a woolly mammoth will be born in five to six years.
