Facebook Promised Poor Countries Free Internet. People Got Charged Anyway.

Facebook says it’s helping millions of the world’s poorest people get online through apps and services that allow them to use internet data free. Internal company documents show that many of these people end up being charged in amounts that collectively add up to an estimated millions of dollars a month.

To attract new users, Facebook made deals with cellular carriers in countries including Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines to let low-income people use a limited version of Facebook and browse some other websites without data charges. Many of the users have inexpensive cellphone plans that cost just a few dollars a month, often prepaid, for phone service and a small amount of internet data.

Because of software problems at Facebook, which it has known about and failed to correct for months, people using the apps in free mode are getting unexpectedly charged by local cellular carriers for using data. In many cases they only discover this when their prepaid plans are drained of funds.

In internal documents, employees of Facebook parent

Meta Platforms Inc.


FB 0.12%

acknowledge this is a problem. Charging people for services Facebook says are free “breaches our transparency principle,” an employee wrote in an October memo.

In the year ended July 2021, charges made by the cellular carriers to users of Facebook’s free-data products grew to an estimated total of $7.8 million a month, when purchasing power adjustments were made, from about $1.3 million a year earlier, according to a Facebook document.

Mir Zaman, right, who owns a convenience store in Muzaffarabad, transfers mobile data to customer Sheikh Imran.



Photo:

Saiyna Bashir for The Wall Street Journal

The documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal were written in the fall of 2021 and are not part of the information made public by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager.

Facebook calls the problem “leakage,” since paid services are leaking into the free apps and services. It defines leakage in internal documents as, “When users are in Free Mode and believe that the data they are using is being covered by their carrier networks, even though these users are actually paying for the data themselves.”

A Meta spokesman said Facebook has received reports from users about data leakage and has investigated them. “We’ve continued work trying to resolve the issue we’ve identified.” He said the company has mitigated most of the problem and that work continues. The spokesman said new versions of free mode are labeled “text only” and don’t prominently display the words “Free mode,” although previous versions still in use continue to do so. He said the company is working on updates.

The spokesman said free-mode users are notified when they sign up that videos aren’t free. They are supposed to get a notification that they will be charged if they click on a video, but it doesn’t always work. He said Facebook is working to fix that.

The spokesman said the estimate of the additional monthly data charges isn’t based

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Top Universities Providing Free Programming Language Courses



by

October 30, 2021

In today’s world that is dominated by technology, programming has become very important. With programming, one would not just develop skills but also possess the ability to solve an issue in a rational as well as creative manner. With that being said, which is the best programming language course is a question that many struggles to find answers to. Don’t worry! In this post, we have listed top universities providing free programming language courses.

 

Harvard University

Harvard University is always in limelight for providing numerous free courses in a wide range of fields. One such course offered by this esteemed university is CS50. This free programming course is no less than a savior for someone who has no prior experience in coding or computer science. This is because this course will throw light on every single topic starting from the basics. Well, that’s not all. You would be allowed to present your own programming project at the conclusion. How amazing is that? By the end of the course, you’d have sound knowledge about languages such as C, Python, JavaScript, SQL, as well as CSS and HTML. All this in just 12 weeks!!

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers a wide range of free introductory courses in the area of ​​programming and computer science — both for beginners as well as intermediate and advanced students. “6,0001 Introduction to Computer science and Programming in Python” is the first step for students with little or no programming experience. Here, basic computational and programming concepts are explained in the best possible manner. A continuation to this free programming course is “6,0002 Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science” which uses Python 3.5 programming language just like the former.

 

Duke University

Duke University is that one place where one can find free online courses on Java Programming and Software Engineering Fundamentals Specialization. This is a 5-month long course at the end of which one would be well acquainted with the fundamentals, how to develop algorithms, test and debug applications, and a lot more.

 

Columbia University

“Analytics in Python” is a free programming course with a simple objective – to develop students’ ability to analyze data and make decisions based on data from learning the Python programming language. Everything from the basics of Python programming to giving a practical understanding of how to use programs to handle data is what the experts aim to deliver via this course. This is an intermediate-level course and the students can obtain certification as well at the end of the course. However, a certain fee is to be paid for this.

 

The University of Michigan

The University of Michigan offers two free programming courses – Python for Everybody Specialization and the other is Web Development Fundamentals and Coding Specialization. The former covers concepts such as data structures, networked application program interfaces, and databases from scratch to depth. “Web Development Fundamentals and Coding Specialization” course talk about how to write

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