Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent

Post by pdkl95 » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

iamrobschiavone wrote: post #94

smt88 wrote: post #42

Saying "unintentionally" here is like saying you unintentionally stole someone's TV when they gave you their key to walk their dog. It takes extra work to upload those contacts, which means several managers and developers decided to do it and then spent time implementing it. For the FB employees reading this: what is your tipping point? Would you say no to that assignment?

A common practice is to keep developers unaware of the real objective of their work (like Uber, in another comment on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13786384 ): - developer A is tasked to create the prompt to ask for username and password of the email account - developer B is tasked to call some API to upload contacts from email account - developer C is tasked to bind two functionalities. Now replace develo…

Post by OrgNet » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #62

I'm pretty sure LinkedIn does or used to do the same.

Post by hodder » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #122

matt4077 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer, but at least in my jurisdiction, fraud requires a monetary loss by the victim. Generally, civil law is better suited for this sort of thing, no matter how good a pitchfork feels in your hand. As but one of the reasons, the required standard of proof is much lower.

There’s got to be a monetary loss here. If there isn’t precedent for calculating that loss, such precedent should be established. Our email contacts are valuable, especially at 150m user scale. We could have all banded together and sold them, had Facebook not stolen them. These users should be compensated.

Post by jtms » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

w0m wrote: post #116

codedokode wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks too compilcated. Will you also use several different QA engineers and several product managers for this?

.. isn't that how larger scale projects are done?

Post by username223 » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 1:40 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #70

hluska wrote: post #63

At some point, some government is going to have to step in and stop Facebook. Five years ago, I would not have believed that I would have supported government action. Now, I’m afraid for the future if there is no intervention.

I don't know if you've followed the news, but multiple governments have investigated, sued and fined Facebook. A quick Google indicates Facebook may end up paying 1.6 billion to the EU. The UK is doing an investigation too, with FB's impact on the Brexit referendum, as well as the whole Cambridge Analytica thing. If you're thinking Facebook is getting away with it, you're wrong. Of course, they're mainly getting fine…