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Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

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Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#11

Post by stoney »

ja27 wrote: post #7
maukdaddy wrote: post #2

It will be a cold day in hell before I send a copy of my ID to facebook. WTF are people thinking?!

There are worse threats. It took me less than 15 minutes to find a decent photo of you, what I think is your work address (zip 60603), possibly your home address (number is 519) and phone number (726 in the middle). I didn't come up with your date of birth but I can make a pretty good guess about your wife's (digits add up to 2011) and the date of your wedding (adds up to 2022). I'm sorry if that completely creeps yo…

Wow, that might be a little creepy but it's very eye opening. Especially as maukdaddy lists "information security" as his business, so is presumably not too reckless with his details online.

I'm assuming you started with his HN profile, googled his name, found what appears to be his blog and took it from there?

Maybe these days having a common name is a good defence against ID fraud!

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#12

Post by rwwmike »

stoney wrote: post #9

And this is one of the reasons that I don't like the idea of facebook being my universal log on for lots of different sites. It takes things from mild irritation at having to find another way to waste time, to a potentially major problem when I can't access services that I use every day.

I agree. Facebook having complete ownership and control over my identity is a scary thought. The site is far too reckless and cavalier with its banning of people, business sites, apps, etc. I've read far too many accounts of banishments without any given reason or response to complaints...

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#13

Post by jdp23 »

jdp23 wrote: post #3

only women were affected. Facebook's got several anti-woman policies (for example banning pictures of breast-feeding, and prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms) but in this case they're blaming a bug. it would be it would be interesting to hear more about what the actual issue is.

oh look, once again i mentioned gender and got downvoted. funny how that works.

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#15

Post by maukdaddy »

ja27 wrote: post #7
maukdaddy wrote: post #2

It will be a cold day in hell before I send a copy of my ID to facebook. WTF are people thinking?!

There are worse threats. It took me less than 15 minutes to find a decent photo of you, what I think is your work address (zip 60603), possibly your home address (number is 519) and phone number (726 in the middle). I didn't come up with your date of birth but I can make a pretty good guess about your wife's (digits add up to 2011) and the date of your wedding (adds up to 2022). I'm sorry if that completely creeps yo…

I work in infosec, so none of that surprises me. But voluntarily sending something like my drivers license is completely insane.

Correct on zip code, but not surprising since I work in public sector. My salary is published if you look hard enough.

Edit for full disclosure: correct on zip and wife's bday, wrong on others. Off by one on annivesary

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#16

Post by naz »

jdp23 wrote: post #3

only women were affected. Facebook's got several anti-woman policies (for example banning pictures of breast-feeding, and prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms) but in this case they're blaming a bug. it would be it would be interesting to hear more about what the actual issue is.

They don't ban breastfeeding images, they ban images of breasts. They don't ban domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms, they ban pseudonyms.

It is easy to make a subset of a policy appear discriminatory. For example, Facebook ban black people from creating multiple profiles. Clearly racist, until you consider they ban everyone from creating multiple profiles.

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#17

Post by maukdaddy »

stoney wrote: post #11
ja27 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are worse threats. It took me less than 15 minutes to find a decent photo of you, what I think is your work address (zip 60603), possibly your home address (number is 519) and phone number (726 in the middle). I didn't come up with your date of birth but I can make a pretty good guess about your wife's (digits add up to 2011) and the date of your wedding (adds up to 2022). I'm sorry if that completely creeps yo…

Wow, that might be a little creepy but it's very eye opening. Especially as maukdaddy lists "information security" as his business, so is presumably not too reckless with his details online. I'm assuming you started with his HN profile, googled his name, found what appears to be his blog and took it from there? Maybe these days having a common name is a good defence against ID fraud!

I'm not too careful with my birthdate or anniversary. LinkedIn is a huge source of information leakage, but the business and networking value outweighs that. You could datamine my twitter and find most important dates and events.

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#18

Post by jdp23 »

naz wrote: post #16
jdp23 wrote: post #3

only women were affected. Facebook's got several anti-woman policies (for example banning pictures of breast-feeding, and prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms) but in this case they're blaming a bug. it would be it would be interesting to hear more about what the actual issue is.

They don't ban breastfeeding images, they ban images of breasts. They don't ban domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms, they ban pseudonyms. It is easy to make a subset of a policy appear discriminatory. For example, Facebook ban black people from creating multiple profiles. Clearly racist, until you consider they ban everyone from creating multiple profiles.

it's easy for people to find ways to justify a discriminatory policy as even-handed. you're right, though, they also ban pictures of guys breast-feeding.

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#19

Post by mlinsey »

jdp23 wrote: post #3

only women were affected. Facebook's got several anti-woman policies (for example banning pictures of breast-feeding, and prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms) but in this case they're blaming a bug. it would be it would be interesting to hear more about what the actual issue is.

I frequently get friend requests from fake profiles on Facebook (sometimes as many as 2-3 per week). They always list themselves as having gone to my high school (which is why I am positive they are fake, since I went to a tiny high school), and they always are attractive-looking women. I do not list my sex on Facebook, but it is possible that the bot recognizes my first name as male and therefore friends me with a female profile, and that there are other spam profiles which are male, but I am almost certain this is not the case since I see in my news feed whenever one of my high school friends falls for the spammer, and they are again always female profiles. So I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of spam profiles on Facebook are of females.

The most widespread method of stopping spam in any form is to use flags to train an machine learning algorithm that picks out particular patterns in spam. These algorithms don't have political agendas, they just pick out common characteristics of spam. It is therefore entirely unsurprising that any such spam detector would learn to only flag women, and therefore to be expected that a bug in that algorithm which generated false positives would affect only women's profiles.

The reason you are downvoted is not because you are trying to highlight women's issues (I got 50+ karma for calling out another comment as sexist against women a few weeks ago), but because you were quick to imply a sexist motive for behavior that most any hacker would have immediately recognized as a natural consequence of how poorly-performing spam-detectors behave.

Re: Facebook bug disables women's accounts, asks for government ID, fix in process

#20

Post by verroq »

jdp23 wrote: post #13
jdp23 wrote: post #3

only women were affected. Facebook's got several anti-woman policies (for example banning pictures of breast-feeding, and prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms) but in this case they're blaming a bug. it would be it would be interesting to hear more about what the actual issue is.

oh look, once again i mentioned gender and got downvoted. funny how that works.

You didn't get downvoted for mentioning gender. You got downvoted for strawmans.
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