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By Ime Archibong, VP Product Partnerships

Since first launching Community Boost in St Louis in March of this year, we’ve visited more than 30 cities, partnered with 60 local organizations, and established our first national partnership with the National Urban League to help small businesses grow and people gain the skills they need to compete in the digital economy. By 2020 we plan to have trained 1 million people across the country. This week, we’re honored to bring Community Boost home to Menlo Park and East Palo Alto from August 27 – 29.

This week we want to learn more about your challenges and victories as small business owners and community leaders and to share training to support you. We are also excited to announce the development of new digital marketing certificate programs with Cañada College and Foothill College. Our partnerships with these community colleges will help ensure that you have access to resources and vital workforce development training long after this week’s events end.

Local Small Businesses and the Demand for Digital Skills
According to the Small Business Administration, 99.2% of California businesses are considered small. Despite being members of a community considered to be a global technology hub, many small business owners and job seekers in East Palo Alto and the surrounding towns felt they lacked expertise in digital skills they believed important to their growth.

Demand for digital skills: When surveyed, 8 in 10 small businesses told us that when looking to hire employees for their businesses, digital skills were important. When asked about where a candidate went to school, only half of small businesses stated that was an important factor. Skills gap in social media: Over half (51%) of small business workers said that creating a social media presence is important to growing their business, but only about 1 in 10 (11%) said that their skills in this area were excellent.

We believe that our partnerships with Cañada College, Foothill College and more than 20 community colleges across the US will contribute to digital marketing programs designed to meet many of these digital skills demands, and supply local small businesses a workforce that can contribute immediately to small business growth.

Serving our Community is Important to Us
We’re thankful to be members of the Menlo Park and East Palo Alto community and are committed to doing our part to help it thrive. For more information about our small business initiatives and Facebook Community Boost, find us at: facebook.com/communityboost.

The ethnic violence in Myanmar has been truly horrific. Earlier this month, we shared an update on the steps we’re taking to prevent the spread of hate and misinformation on Facebook. While we were too slow to act, we’re now making progress – with better technology to identify hate speech, improved reporting tools, and more people to review content.

Today, we are taking more action in Myanmar, removing a total of 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook Pages, followed by almost 12 million people. We are preserving data, including content, on the accounts and Pages we have removed.

Specifically, we are banning 20 individuals and organizations from Facebook in Myanmar — including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the military’s Myawady television network. International experts, most recently in a report by the UN Human Rights Council-authorized Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, have found evidence that many of these individuals and organizations committed or enabled serious human rights abuses in the country. And we want to prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions. This has led us to remove six Pages and six accounts from Facebook — and one account from Instagram — which are connected to these individuals and organizations. We have not found a presence on Facebook or Instagram for all 20 individuals and organizations we are banning.

We have also removed 46 Pages and 12 accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook. During a recent investigation, we discovered that they used seemingly independent news and opinion Pages to covertly push the messages of the Myanmar military. This type of behavior is banned on Facebook because we want people to be able to trust the connections they make.

We continue to work to prevent the misuse of Facebook in Myanmar — including through the independent human rights impact assessment we commissioned earlier in the year. This is a huge responsibility given so many people there rely on Facebook for information — more so than in almost any other country given the nascent state of the news media and the recent rapid adoption of mobile phones. It’s why we’re so determined to do better in the future.

A sample of the content from these Pages and accounts is included below.

The following pieces of content violate our Community Standards and were removed from Facebook.

Apple Kyoto opens on Shijō Dori
Apple Kyoto opened Saturday morning in the heart of Kyoto’s main shopping corridor. A queue of customers stretched 10 blocks down Shijō Dori to visit Apple’s first store in Kyoto, a cultural and technological hub for Japan.
Press Contacts
Nick Leahy,Apple, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., (408) 862-5012
Abby Reisinger,Apple,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,(669) 227-3527
Apple Media Helpline,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,(408) 974-2042
Original author: Apple Newsroom

Mastercard Decision IntelligenceTM adds AI capabilities to KeyBank’s fraud detection efforts

 Purchase, N.Y. – Aug.  23, 2018 –Mastercard and KeyBank today announced that the bank will now use Mastercard Decision Intelligence™, a security solution that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make more informed authorization decisions.

Mastercard Decision Intelligence

This will enable KeyBank to increase the accuracy of real-time approvals of genuine transactions and enhance the overall cardholder experience. This is the first use of AI being implemented in KeyBank’s fraud detection services.

“Our renewed relationship with Mastercard, as partners to provide a simple, seamless and secure way to manage money, is another example how we work to help clients make financial progress, one decision at a time,” said Jason Rudman, head of KeyBank Consumer Payments and Digital.

Building off its long-term understanding of KeyBank’s business and its customers, Mastercard will also collaborate on new product development initiatives to deliver technology and services to build its franchise, capitalize on new opportunities and transform into a client-centric, digital bank.

“We are excited to continue partnering with KeyBank to deliver client-centric solutions and artificial intelligence capabilities beyond card payments,” said Raj Seshadri, president of U.S. issuers, Mastercard.  “We are tapping our deep capabilities in data analysis to help KeyBank with fraud detection.”

KeyBank and Mastercard renewed their exclusive relationship last year to deliver payment services to the bank’s consumer, small business and commercial customers. The 20 year relationship started with KeyBank offering a range of Mastercard-branded debit card options. Joint operations soon expanded to include debit and prepaid transaction processing capabilities from Mastercard Payment Transaction Services, which then paved the way for testing, piloting and achieving production readiness for all KeyBank and Mastercard offerings. Most recently, the two companies seamlessly and successfully converted approximately one million First Niagara customers to KeyBank clients.

 

About Mastercard

Mastercard (NYSE: MA), www.mastercard.com, is a technology company in the global payments industry.  Our global payments processing network connects consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories.  Mastercard products and solutions make everyday commerce activities – such as shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances – easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone.  Follow us on Twitter @MastercardNews, join the discussion on the Beyond the Transaction Blog and subscribe for the latest news on the Engagement Bureau.

 

Mastercard Communications Contact

Chaiti Sen |914.263.6542
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Original author: Chaiti Sen

By Ime Archibong, VP of Product Partnerships

Today we banned myPersonality — an app that was mainly active prior to 2012 — from Facebook for failing to agree to our request to audit and because it’s clear that they shared information with researchers as well as companies with only limited protections in place. As a result we will notify the roughly 4 million people who chose to share their Facebook information with myPersonality that it may have been misused. Given we currently have no evidence that myPersonality accessed any friends’ information, we will not be notifying these people’s Facebook friends. Should that change, we will notify them.

Since launching our investigation in March, we have investigated thousands of apps. And we have suspended more than 400 due to concerns around the developers who built them or how the information people chose to share with the app may have been used — which we are now investigating in much greater depth.

It’s also why we’ve changed many of our policies — such as our expansion of App Review and our new policy that no information will be shared with apps if you haven’t used them in 90 days. We will continue to investigate apps and make the changes needed to our platform to ensure that we are doing all we can to protect people’s information.

Apple Pay and Apple Watch help customers celebrate America’s national parks
Apple today introduced new ways customers can enjoy and support America’s national parks with an Apple Pay donation program and Apple Watch Activity Challenge.
From August 24 through 31, Apple is donating $1 to the National Park Foundation for every purchase made with Apple Pay at any Apple Store, on apple.com or through the Apple Store app in the US.
Proceeds will support the National Park Foundation’s mission to protect national parks through projects like habitat restoration and historic preservation and engage the next generation of park stewards through programs like Open OutDoors for Kids.
“America’s national parks are treasures everyone should experience, and we’re proud to support them again this month by donating a dollar for every purchase made with Apple Pay at one of our stores,” said Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. “These awe-inspiring places are our national inheritance, and Apple is doing our part to pass them on to future generations — just as extraordinary, beautiful and wild as we found them.”
On September 1, Apple Watch users around the world who complete a walk, run or wheelchair workout of 50 minutes of more will earn an Activity app award and stickers for Messages inspired by national parks. The 50 minutes pays homage to Redwood National Park’s 50th anniversary celebration this year.
The App Store will also highlight a collection of some of the best apps to help users easily navigate and explore the country’s most beautiful national parks.
Building on the continuous commitment to preserving the environment, Apple has protected and created enough sustainably managed forests around the world to cover its current and future paper use. In partnership with The Conservation Fund, Apple has protected 36,000 acres of forest in the eastern United States that are certified as sustainably managed. Last year Apple reached its sustainable packaging goal: 100 percent of the paper in Apple’s packaging was from responsibly managed forests, controlled wood or recycled sources.
Press Contacts
Nikki Rothberg,Apple,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,(408) 974-4427
Katie Clark Alsadder,Apple,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,(408) 974-9976
Apple Media Helpline,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,(408) 974-2042
Original author: Apple Newsroom

Apple Kyoto opens Saturday on Shijō Dori
Apple will open its first store in Kyoto, a cultural and technological hub for Japan, Saturday on Shijō Dori. The street, surrounded by many of Kyoto’s famous shrines and temples, has served as the city’s main shopping corridor since the 1600s.
Apple Kyoto's architecture takes inspiration from local design and materials, with the upper levels clad in a translucent envelope inspired by Japanese lanterns. The use of lightweight timber frame and special paper on the upper facade also draw reference to the country’s traditional houses. The building is centered around a multi-level atrium that is also where the store will offer free Today at Apple sessions daily on photography, music, coding and more.
Japan was home to Apple’s first store outside the US, opening in Tokyo in 2003. Apple is in the midst of a retail expansion in the country, opening several new stores, and remodeling many others, in the coming years.
Press Contacts
Nick Leahy,Apple, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., (408) 862-5012
Abby Reisinger,Apple,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,(669) 227-3527
Apple Media Helpline,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,(408) 974-2042
Original author: Apple Newsroom

By Rob Leathern, Director of Product Management

We’re making advertising more transparent to help prevent abuse on Facebook, especially during elections. Today we’re starting to roll out the Ad Archive API, so researchers and journalists can more easily analyze Facebook ads related to politics or issues of national importance.

Beginning with a group of publishers, academics and researchers in the US, we’ll learn what’s most useful and how to improve the API before opening it up more broadly. Input from this group will also form the basis of an Archive report that will be available starting in September.

The API offers ad creative, start and end date, and performance data, including total spend and impressions for ads. It also shows demographics of people reached, including age, gender and location.

We’re greatly encouraged by trends and insights that watchdog groups, publishers and academics have unearthed since the archive launched in May. We believe this deeper analysis will increase accountability for both Facebook and advertisers.

If you’d like to access the API, please submit this form and we’ll respond after this initial test.

  1. Mastercard Sustainability Report Highlights Progress Towards a More Inclusive and Resilient World
  2. Taking Down More Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior
  3. Update on Myanmar
  4. People Raise $300M Through Birthday Fundraisers in First Year

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