How is this not a crime?
They trick you to get your password, then steal your contacts. Seems like typical malware.
Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
211–220 of 310 posts
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#212Since FB has gone out of their way to weaponize "friendship", my suggestion to everyone who actually likes to have some standards in their life and don't like to be manipulated like that is simple. Just do it back to them. "Unfriend" (IRL) everyone you know who works at Facebook and tell them you will "friend" them back once they leave the company.
I would never friend someone again who dropped me because of my employer
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulation is much more realistic, IMO. The tech industry worships money and those who make it, and there are plenty of engineers who'd take the FB compensation package in a heartbeat, regardless of FB's public image problem. This idea that the public will act together morally to stop corporate malfeasance while sacrificing their good fortunes isn't that realistic. Look at the FB shareholder situation. Lots of shareh…
> while sacrificing their good fortunes isn't that realistic. ... this does not need to happen. Plenty of other companies in the Bay Area pay as well as FB, but without the heartache.
But there's some kind of inertia keeping those employees at FB for some reason. Why put in all the effort to leave for another company to get paid the same? Most people won't do that.
Engineers aren't going to start quitting en masse until their compensation is threatened (i.e. the stock irreversibly tanks). In order for that to happen, shareholders need to stage a massive sell-off, which won't likely happen soon due to FOMO.
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also from the article > A Facebook spokesperson also told Gizmodo that a screenshot of the original opt-in prompt was not available. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but if you're trying to claim you cannot capture a screenshot from any release meant to be shipped out, either you're crap at release management or are full of shit. Which one is it? Also, even if we were to suspend logic and belive this was a bug, what's F…
> I'm not a conspiracy theorist but if you're trying to claim you cannot capture a screenshot from any release meant to be shipped out, either you're crap at release management or are full of shit. Which one is it? That doesn't strike me as especially unlikely, especially for a specific branch of the app codebase that would likely only operate with a huge number of other co-dependent codebases for backend systems tha…
I would say it should take less than an hour for a dev to get an instance of a specific revision up and running, not months...but I agree with the thrust of your message: when the reporter asked their Facebook representative for a screenshot of the box, they looked in their pictures folder for a screenshot. They probably did not try to spin up an instance for the developer.
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#215The only way FB will change its ways is if (a) good engineers stop joining them, and (b) good engineers at FB start leaving. This will threaten their entire growth prospectives and finally bring about change. I was having discussions with FB recruiter and some of their senior managers. I just informed them that I won't be pursuing that anymore. FB engineers who are on HN: why are you still there? You can make similar…
Please don’t downvote me into being the same color as the page background. I’m giving a serious answer to a question that was posed.
This has been asked before on HN. The genuine answer is some combination of:
* criticisms of FB are wildly exaggerated. This takes many forms, but in this particular case I think it’s the issue of attributing to malice what’s best explained by incompetence. Somebody probably just reused some old email importing code without understanding it thoroughly. If you know anything about how FB works, that’s infinitely more plausible than some shady conspiracy to unethically harvest the contacts of a small percentage of users for a slight improvement in ranking or targeting.
Facebook is not some well-oiled machine, it is a jumbled mess of thousands of junior engineers, perpetually barely avoiding collapsing under its own weight.
* People inside FB generally believe, whatever they think of Zuck, that he doesn’t just outright lie about verifiable facts. The entire code repository is completely open to all employees. If adding this feature really was malicious and FB’s response is an outright lie, somebody WILL find the commit and leak it.
* Even if FB is doing harm, on balance the good it’s doing is greater. It has made communication between humans easier and lower-friction which has many upsides.
Part of this is that all the upsides are concrete and obvious (people fall in love on Facebook/IG/MN/WA, they stay in touch with friends and family, they run a business, etc). Whereas the downsides are abstract and hypothetical (maybe someday someone will use Facebook’s collected data for some nefarious purpose).
* Even if all of the above is false and FB really is harmful to the world, the situation certainly won’t be improved by thinking people quitting, and leaving the company totally in the hands of yes-men who drink all the kool-aid.
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#216This may be an unpopular opinion, but things like this happen. Someone gets the task to implement a login and either doesn't realize they should be using OAuth or is simply too lazy to do so. Next, someone has the idea to suggest friends, so let's grab some email contacts for that purpose. That stuff happens all the time at small companies. While it's certainly bad practice, it's often not evil intent, but just lack…
I'd buy that excuse back in 2008.
But it's been over a decade of these types of reports about FB and their behavior. FB should be asymptoting towards good ethical standards and software practices. These reports should be getting more and more rare.
Instead, they seem to be growing exponentially away from good ethics and practices [0]. It feels like it's getting worse, faster, not less worse and slower.
Here's a partial list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
[0] Yes, I'm being a bit hyperbolic with the graph analogies.
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#217I don't recall ever hearing that Facebook made a mistake which decreased the amount of data they collected or their usage thereof. Can anyone provide an example?
I'm sure Facebook has had bugs that broke various forms of data collection, or missed data they could have collected. We wouldn't hear about it, but it would be surprising if it hadn't happened.
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#218FB has said they'll be notifying the people whose contacts they "unintentionally" uploaded. How about notifying those contacts whose private details they illicitly obtained that their privacy has been compromised by Facebook - the innocents who signed up for FB and had their contact-list stolen (let's call it what it is) may or may not feel any moral obligation (more likely, don't even see the issue) to notify their…
How about notifying those contacts whose private details they illicitly obtained that their privacy has been compromised
Because there's a difference between "we screwed up and obtained this" and "we screwed up, obtained this, then used it. Hope our use didn't result in any problems for you."
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
>don’t forget that these users consciously gave Facebook their passwords. There is a lot of legal precedence about social engineering and how to prosecute it, this would completely fall under fraud. If I ask someone for their password to perform some service and they then I copy all of their data, that is a crime regardless of how stupid they are. This really doesn't matter at all in a case of fraud if you gave the p…
Hey I’m 100% with you. I’m not defending Facebook, and it’s crazy they ask for passwords. But just because Facebook’s at fault doesn’t mean that it’s okay as a user to give out your password, nor does it mean that you lost any money when contacts are copied, right? The words “stealing” and “robbing” don’t really convey what happened here, even in the case Facebook isn’t telling the truth.
You are saying that the words 'rob' and 'steal' don't convey what has happened here, but this is only true in the colloquial sense. There is a good reason why many legal codes and laws start off with a exhaustively long list of definitions. Legal definitions often are different in very subtle ways that maybe aren't apparent at first glance.
If you don't think that this is the proper framing, maybe consider a different one. It is clear that there is definitely room to interpret this as a civil or criminal act regardless of how the parties craft their arguments. For example, imagine an employee that copies company data, even if it has no actual value under their authorized username/password on the last day of work. This is often charged as a clear criminal offense. So to reiterate, employee with authorization to access dataset, copies a large dataset with no obvious monetary value on their last day of work, but one that they weren't given permission to copy. There are cases that have been literally this, and it is easy to see how this incident could line up with this legal approach.
I think you are fixating too much on a critique of the specific charge listed by the top of this thread. I was defending the idea that there would probably be a way to go about mounting a case in that way. You seem to think that this is the incorrect legal framing for this, which is totally fine. The legal process is more of a subjective art than a science.
Re: Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent
#220The only way FB will change its ways is if (a) good engineers stop joining them, and (b) good engineers at FB start leaving. This will threaten their entire growth prospectives and finally bring about change. I was having discussions with FB recruiter and some of their senior managers. I just informed them that I won't be pursuing that anymore. FB engineers who are on HN: why are you still there? You can make similar…
Please don’t downvote me into being the same color as the page background. I’m giving a serious answer to a question that was posed. This has been asked before on HN. The genuine answer is some combination of: * criticisms of FB are wildly exaggerated. This takes many forms, but in this particular case I think it’s the issue of attributing to malice what’s best explained by incompetence. Somebody probably just reused…
Hi FB employee -- I very much disagree with your position. The external reality is far from what you have said.
* Criticisms of FB are not exaggerated. In this case, FB stole 1.5 million creds, then used these creds to harvest user data (nobody actually wants to give this data away, it was taken by force). If an individual did this, they would be in prison. FB gets away with it... again..
* People inside FB are a cult. It has been shown that MZ will lie about verifiable facts, even to congress! Its wilful suspension of reality for the sake of a huge paycheck. ... "when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
* FB is doing harm, and Its not on balance greater. Its divisive, promotes untruth, gives a voice to those that really shouldn't have a voice, spreads misinformation, promotes hate and dismantles democracy. Not to mention... Ostracization? Murder? Genocide? Exactly how many FB whistleblowers have existed in history? Is this worth it so people can share cat and dog pictures, and stolen memes from other media? I'd say, no.
* One of the most troubling moments in my recent history was visiting India, and seeing how FB is so influential in general discourse. I had people tell me great, unjust untruths like they were facts -- "I read it on facebook".
* If FB has no users anymore, it has no advertisers, it goes away. Better for the world!
FB is arguably the most destructive force of the 21st century. We will never be free until we shake its iron grip on humanity.