Facebook today announced new features for Messenger that will alert you when messages appear to come from financial scammers or potential child abusers, displaying warnings in the Messenger app that provide tips and suggest you block the offenders.
)Photograph: Bill Ingalls/NASAWhen NASA’s MESSENGER mission was in orbit around Mercury, it took photos of the planet in unprecedented detail, including this photo of the rim of the Rembrant basin.
Another blog post on the company’s design hub goes into more detail about how the team used “custom typography, rounded corners, open tracking and capitalization to create visual distinction between the company and the app.” This apparent faith in the world-changing power of a good font will be familiar to anyone who has ever read a design brief.
In the past 24 hours, the company’s services, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus, froze for most of a day and a newspaper revealed that a new crop of prosecutors is investigating the company for criminal behavior related to a slew of data partnerships.
(Also note that Facebook apparently did not bother asking those questions when giving the power to Zuckerberg and other company executives.) “With a feature like Remove Message, we wanted to carefully balance flexibility and control with protecting our users from abuse of the feature,” says a Facebook spokesperson.