Daily Safeguarding Update

Snapchat now lets Users Show Number of Subscribers

Snapchat is now allowing creators to publicise how many subscribers they have
This is the first time Snapchat has given its users any sort of public-facing metric about their followings or audiences and represents a substantial change to the platform
A Snap spokesperson said: “We’ve listened to feedback from our creator community and many of them expressed interest in having the option to show that their community on Snapchat is growing”
Creators can decide to turn this feature on or off from their settings
The company introduced creator profiles in September, which gives users on the platform more insights into their audience and helps them coordinate with brands

A social media influencer has become the first person to be reprimanded by the UK’s advertising watchdog over a TikTok post
The ruling centred on a video published by Emily Canham that promoted products made by the hair-styling brand GHD
The regulator said it should have featured a ‘#ad’ hashtag or similar label.
Until now, the body has focused on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, as well as traditional media
“This may be our first ruling on a TikTok post, but brands, advertisers and influencers should be fully aware that the ad rules apply to them across online and in social media,” a spokesman for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) told the BBC

Tax returns, contracts and bank statements were among the “deleted” files recovered by Abertay University investigators from used USB drives
Cybersecurity researchers discovered about 75,000 files after buying 100 of the drives on an internet auction site
Some USB drives contained files named “passwords” and images with embedded location data
All but two of the drives appeared empty, but the team said it had been “worryingly easy” to retrieve data
The researchers used “publicly-available tools” to retrieve the sensitive information.
They said only 32 of the drives had been properly wiped
Partial files were extracted from 26 devices and every single file was extracted from the remaining 42 USB drives

Facebook and Instagram have pushed a notification to users telling them that there are no results yet in the presidential election, after Donald Trump’s false claim that he had already won
The pop-up tells people on both apps that votes are still being counted and they should not believe premature claims of victory
“Votes Are Still Being Counted,” the message reads. “The winner of the 2020 US presidential election has not been projected.”
It then sends users to Facebook’s information hub, where results and further reading can be found
Both Facebook and Twitter had said in advance of the election that they would apply warning labels to any posts that claimed victory before results were actually decided.
They each applied those warnings to President Trump’s posts, with Twitter choosing to hide one tweet entirely

Europol, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom coordinated a Europe-wide joint action day targeting child trafficking, supported by Frontex (the European Border and Coastguard Agency), which took place between 5 and 11 October 2020 across 12 countries
A wide range of law enforcement agencies including police, immigration, and border control, transport police, social assistance and child protection services, and labour inspectorates participated in the joint action
The actions led to 388 arrests, 19 additional suspects were identified, and 40 new investigations initiated
Overall, 249 potential victims of human trafficking were identified, 61 of whom were confirmed to be minors.The ages of 107 victims have not yet been determined
The national authorities focused on border crossings and main transport hubs to identify potential victims and suspects of human trafficking
Each country adopted the activities according to the types of child trafficking that were nationally prevalent.