Facebook unveils digital skilling, mentorship programme in 5 Indian states

Facebook announced a digital skilling, mentorship programme aimed at inspiring and guiding tribal girls in five states.

“Spanning across West Bengal, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, the initiative seeks to nurture and train young girls from India’s tribal heartland across three core areas – digital literacy, life skills, leadership and entrepreneurship,” Facebook said in a statement.

“Spanning a period of one year, the programme will see on-ground trainers impart digital literacy to the identified girls through a dedicated digital skilling curriculum while the 25 women leaders mentor them via Facebook or WhatsApp on a fortnightly basis,” the statement added.

To be a part of the programme, applicants will be required to be over 18 years of age and of tribal origin.

“The programme will specifically focus on girls who’ve dropped out of school due to financial constraints, reside near the skilling centre to ensure regular participation,” the statement added.

For more information please visit:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/facebook-unveils-digital-skilling-mentorship-programme-in-5-indian-states/articleshow/67873101.cms

Deactivating Facebook for just four weeks can lead to an improvement in people’s mental health, according to a new study

Deactivating the social network left people less informed but happier, researchers find

Researchers at New York University and Stanford University studied the impact of quitting the social network on their behaviour and state of mind.

For more information please visit following 2 links:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/01/facebook-mental-health-study-happiness-delete-account

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/31/how-facebook-robbed-us-of-our-sense-of-self

ZUCKERBERG CONFIRMS MERGING MESSENGER, WHATSAPP, INSTAGRAM MESSAGES BY 2020

Zuckerberg has now explained that combining these three platforms will provide offer more secure end-to-end encryption. While end-to-end encryption is currently available only on WhatsApp, this move is said to benefit Messenger and Instagram users as it would enable them to send end-to-end encrypted messages across these platforms. Right now end-to-end encryption has to be activated on Messenger whereas it’s not available on Instagram DMs.

He also noted that ‘tens of millions’ of Android users who use Messenger as their default SMS app at present would benefit from having encryption enabled as a default.

“The integration that we’re thinking about, we’re really early in thinking through this,” said Zuckerberg during the earnings call. “There’s a lot more we need to figure out. I think it’s the direction we should be going with more things in the future,” he added.

But while Facebook’s CEO is planning to broaden the availability of end-to-end encryption by stitching the apps’ infrastructure into one, several questions have raised about privacy and how users data will be shared across these messaging services.

For more information visit:

http://Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook won’t merge the backends of WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram until at least 2020