This week in social media, a judge in Brazil ordered WhatsApp to be blocked throughout the country (again) and that order was overturned within a day (again). Meanwhile, one of Facebook's most impressive features has sparked a privacy lawsuit that the company is losing, Twitter tweaked another mobile feature in hopes of increasing user activity, and Snapchat is still experimenting with new ad technology.

It's time for Social Media Sunday!

Facebook

Brazil vs. WhatsApp, Again

Facebook-owned WhatsApp was banned from all of Brazil on Tuesday, after a judge ordered the country's major wireless carriers to block the app under threat of hefty fines.

This happened in December of last year, and that time the ban was overturned by a higher court in less than a day. This time, it took about a day for the same thing to happen.

The back-and-forth is a result of Brazilian authorities demanding WhatsApp provide some users' data and the company clearly having no intention of doing that, ever. From a technical perspective, it's not clear WhatsApp would even have the ability to fulfill the data requests anyway, since the messaging service is encrypted.

Privacy Lawsuit Over Face Recognition

As Facebook-owned WhatsApp was standing up to Brazil for its users' privacy, Facebook in the U.S. is running into legal trouble for a different privacy issue.

For tech enthusiasts tracking the progress of intelligent software, one of the coolest things that started happening on Facebook was the suggested tags feature for photos. In the "old days" of early Facebook, you'd have to tag every friend in a picture, yourself.

But thanks to Facebook developing a system that analyzes faces in those tagged pictures and building up a geometric representation for reference that the company calls a "faceprint," the platform's whiz-bang software now recognizes who's in the photo by itself.

As CNET reported this week, Facebook's storing of that faceprint data (though outlined in Facebook's data policy with an ability to opt out), is the source of a privacy lawsuit that Facebook is losing.

This week, the company requested to have the faceprint suit dismissed and was denied by a federal judge in California, even though the law the suit claims is being broken by the company is an Illinois state law, called the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The suit will press forward, as the judge said the plaintiffs had presented a "plausible claim." Facebook, as a result, may have to be more transparent about its data policies presented to users.

Twitter

Still Tinkering

Twitter is not doing well when it comes to growth of its active user base (nor with Wall Street investors), so it's trying a new trick to encourage engagement and discovery.

The company rolled out a new section to its mobile apps on iOS and Android that provide personalized suggestions for accounts to follow, as Mashable reported. You can see the updated tab -- changed from "Find people" to "Connect" -- in the top left of the app. Whether or not you find it useful is another thing entirely.

Snapchat

More Ad Experiments

Snapchat has launched some new ads, along with an entirely new way for companies to engage users through them.

The new ads that are being run first for Target and Lancome are, as AdWeek dubbed it, "shoppable ads." Basically, this means that once you get the 10-second video ad (it's within Cosmopolitan's Discover channel), you can then swipe up to actually shop for the Target or Lancome-promoted product within the ad, and without leaving Snapchat.

Snapchat has been testing various methods to advertise on its unusually youth-oriented social media platform for about a year, experimenting with innovative marketing methods including sponsored Lenses, app-install ads, and branded content.

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