If you’ve been following Pink Squid’s blog at all, our fondness for all things virtual reality can’t have passed you by. So imagine our little faces when rumours began to circulate this week that Facebook have put together a crack team of Oculus experts in our very own city. The team of eight so far comprise the first Oculus team in Europe, and with Facebook having also purchased British VR start-up Surreal Vision last year, Zuck and co. clearly have big plans for Oculus on these shores. We expect candidates to be admiring the 3D render of your interview room via their Facebook profile within a year – if you’re brave enough.
Another interesting development from Facebook this week will affect those who don’t even have an account. The platform will now display ads to non-members. How you ask? Well, a few ways. Cookies, ‘like ’buttons and other plug-ins embedded on third party sites will help Facebook target a wider audience and serve them with more relevant ads to their interests. As you’d expect, the ethical practice of this move has been called into question, but it’s something for employers using social for hiring to think about.
We’ve been full of praise for LinkedIn for the way in which they utilise their shedload of data to help connect employees and employers. Sadly, we can’t say the same for how they guard it. This week the platform admitted that a 2012 security breach was far more serious than first estimated, with approximately 117 million (MILLION!) passwords being accessible by hackers. Users of the platform – that’s probably you – are encouraged to change their passwords immediately, and add two-factor authentication to their login. Wouldn’t want anyone snooping around your email for bank details and the like now, would we?
