FAANG Report: Apple takes shot at Facebook over data breach; Google and Facebook team up on AI

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook piled on in criticizing Facebook after the social media giant got hit by a data breach of 50 million users, saying that kind of incident will not happen in the smartphone maker because the personal data it collects stays locked in iPhones, Vice News said in a report.

“The way we go into product design, we challenge ourselves to collect as little as possible. And when we have it, we challenge ourselves to encrypt it in the end,” Cook said.

“The narrative that some companies will try to get you to believe is, ‘I’ve got to take all of your data to make my service better.’ Well, don’t believe that. Whoever’s telling you that — it’s a bunch of bunk,” he declared.

Apple shares were 1.5% higher at $232.76 by midsession on Wednesday.

The latest data breach in Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is prompting tough new scrutiny of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his management team, a report by USA Today said.

Facebook is looking at an ever-expanding list of problems on its platform that include data harvesting at Cambridge Analytica, Russian election meddling, and the spread of disinformation among others.

“The Facebook board has to get to the bottom of why these systemic problems keep happening. Is it Mark Zuckerberg’s responsibility? If so, he might not be the right person to be CEO of the company,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser told USA Today.

Separately, Facebook is being sued by a Houston woman who claims the platform’s “morally bankrupt corporate culture” left her prey to a predatory pimp who drew her into sex trafficking as a child, a report by the Houston Chronicle said.

Facebook stock went up 2.15% to $162.75.

Alphabet Inc’s Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is teaming up with Facebook to make each company’s artificial intelligence technologies work better, a report by Fortune said.

The two companies said an unspecified number of engineers are collaborating to make Facebook’s open source machine learning PyTorch framework work with Google’s custom computer chips for machine learning, dubbed Tensor Processing Units or TPU. The collaboration marks one of the rare times rivals are working on joint tech projects.

“The long-term goal is to enable everyone to enjoy the simplicity and flexibility of PyTorch while benefiting from the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency of Cloud TPUs,” said Rajen Sheth, the Google Cloud director of product management.

Google shares added 0.27% to $1,203.30.

Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) was accused by eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) of “unlawful and troubling” poaching of merchants on its platform, a report by CNBC said.

Amazon employees have been using eBay’s seller messaging feature to sway merchants to come over to Amazon, eBay claims in the report. The “scheme” has been going on for several years and in several countries, it says. eBay issued a cease and desist letter earlier this week.

“We have uncovered an unlawful and troubling scheme on the part of Amazon to solicit eBay sellers to move to Amazon’s platform,” eBay said in a statement. “We have demanded that Amazon end its unlawful activity and we will take the appropriate steps, as needed, to protect eBay.”

Amazon said it is investigating the allegations.

Amazon shares eased 0.22% to $1,967.

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Netflix Inc (NASDAQ:NFLX) consumes 15% of all internet bandwidth globally, the most of any single application, a report by Variety said in pointing to the latest Global Internet Phenomena Report from Sandvine.

Worldwide, video is 57.7% of the total volume of downstream traffic on the internet, followed by web (17%), gaming (7.8%) and social media (5.1%). Other categories include content marketplaces like iTunes and Google Play (4.6%), file sharing (2.8%), and audio streaming (1%), according to the Sandvine report.

Netflix’s dominant share of internet bandwidth usage is even more impressive considering that its video encoding is more efficient than any other major internet video provider, according to Sandvine.

Netflix stock incrreased 0.6% to $379.49.

Story by ProactiveInvestors