BLABBERMOUTH.NET was used in a live presentation on the opening day of Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday (June 4) in San Jose, California. The annual four-day conference ties together all of the latest updates to Apple's platforms along with some bigger initiatives focused on bolstering privacy and security, and curbing technology addiction. While going over Safari's new features on MacOS Mojave, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi said the web browser works "really hard to protect your privacy," according to CNET. He then took a direct aim at social media giant Facebook by pointing out that "Like" and "Share" buttons, as well as reader comment fields on other sites, can be used to track you, whether you engage with them or not. "We've all seen these, these 'Like' buttons and share buttons," said Federighi (see video below). "It turns out these can be used to track you whether you click on them or not. So this year, we're shutting that down," he added, eliciting applause from the audience. Using BLABBERMOUTH.NET, whose Facebook comments plugin lets people comment on content on the site via their Facebook accounts, as an example, Federighi said Safari will let users know if they want to allow a site like "'facebook.com' to use cookies and web site data while browsing" a specific site. Facebook's social plugins collect data from visitors and send it back to the social network. Although Facebook has said it collects this information for a number of reasons, including security purposes, it is also used to help Facebook target people with ads. According to Wired, Facebook is "not the only large ad network incorporating these techniques. But it's a prominent player that has received extensive criticism for letting a variety of user data tracking tools run rampant." Through the Facebook comments plugin, people can choose to share their comment activity with their friends (and friends of their friends) on Facebook as well. The comments plugin also includes built-in moderation tools and social relevance ranking.
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