Facebook Turns on Safety Check for Paris but Draws Fire of Its Own -- Tech Roundup
Facebook (FB) - Get Report responded to the terrorist attacks in Paris Friday in the most helpful way it knew how -- it turned on its relatively new "Safety Check" tool, allowing those in the City of Lights to rapidly inform friends and family they were safe. According to the social media site and Business Insider, more than 4.1 million people took advantage of the tool to do just that.
But instead of earning unadulterated praise for the move, Business Insider reports, Facebook attracted some criticism from people who pointed out the social media site had not responded similarly to the major terrorist bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, the day before.
Do European lives matter more than those in the Middle East? was the question being asked.
In response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook to explain:
"Many people have rightfully asked why we turned on Safety Check for Paris but not for bombings in Beirut and other places. Until yesterday, our policy was only to activate Safety Check for natural disasters. We just changed this and now plan to activate Safety Check for more human disasters going forward as well."
That's accurate, Business Insider points out: Of the five previous times the tool was used since going live in October 2014, all were for natural disasters.
A later post from Facebook's vice president of user acquisition and retention, Alex Schultz added another rationale for the evolving policy:
"During an ongoing crisis, like war or epidemic, Safety Check in its current form is not that useful for people: because there isn't a clear start or end point and, unfortunately, it's impossible to know when someone is truly 'safe,'" he wrote.
For now, we can only hope that Paris and its people qualify.
Facebook shares closed Monday at $104.04, up a fraction of a percentage point.
Goldman Sachsupgraded its rating on tech major Oracle (ORCL) - Get Report from buy to conviction buy Monday, and boosted its price target from $45 to $47, anticipating that growth in its cloud business will pick up speed in the second half of fiscal 2016. Goldman also expects to see a decline in promotional pricing when Oracle reposts second quarter 2016 earnings, which should lead to higher margins.
In its note, the Goldman analysts said:
"While recent execution inconsistency might be causing investors to pause, we believe execution on Oracle's targets will start to help expand the multiple. In fact, if Oracle is successful in attaining fiscal year 2016 bookings targets, we would expect management to guide to accelerating cloud revenue growth in fiscal year 2017 and with gross margins expanding, we believe fiscal year 2016 will mark the bottom in non-GAAP operating margins."
Oracle closed Monday at 38.12, up 2.2%.
Alphabet, (the search giant formerly known as Google) (GOOGL) - Get Report and Facebook may be big rivals when it comes to attracting online ad dollars and our eyeballs, but they can, at times, agree to work in concert. Facebook on Friday began allowing the search giant to crawl and index content from its mobile app, The Wall Street Journal's Digit's blog reports.
The new arrangement means that when users do Google searches on mobile devices, the results will include content from the Facebook app, with links that will redirect users to the app.
Don't think the two online giants have become besties, though. Google still won't be able to crawl the content shared via private Facebook app sessions, so it's still not welcome in the inner data sanctum of world's largest social network.
Alphabet shares rose 1.4% to close at $750.42.
This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.