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Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

dataviper.io

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Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#431
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software should be secure by default. Don't blame the user. mySQL in comparison wont even let you install without setting a root password. And it only listen on localhost/unix-socket by default. Then you need to explicitly add another user if you want to allow it to login from a non local ip. I don't think it's even possible - to both set a blank root password and allow it to login from a public IP. So you really thi…

While I don't think blaming labor is constructive or ethical, it seems like most tools pose danger to users in proportion to utility. For example, cars can squish people, electricity can fry people, and power tools can remove limbs. Typically, people start out using knives and bicycles as children, learn through experience that crashing and getting cut hurt, and carry those lessons forward when they start using table…

We could teach our children that software is very dangerous, especially databases. Or we could make software secure by default. But we also need to teach the user how to use the software properly. Learning by getting hurt is effective, but then we also need to have playgrounds.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#432
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are highly questionable under GDPR, many of them rely on tracking users wherever they go (e.g. Recaptcha is known for this).

> These are highly questionable under GDPR How many fines has GDPR resulted in?

Not many yet, general consensus is to first warn and get companies to implement better compliance - only those who really openly shit on GDPR get the fines.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NordVPN users are paying money and are getting stabbed in the back. could you please expand on this claim?

From the comment they replied to: https://vpnscam.com/

"My name is Ripoff Reporter." For all that their schtick is about how they're "educating" the public about how shady VPN services are this could be anyone, including a front for a VPN service that isn't mentioned on the site.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#434

Is Elastic going to be punished under GDPR especially given that it's a Dutch company?

Really interesting legal question - "Seems like the ball is with Google at the moment, the exposed data is on their GCP servers. So, they can figure out next steps." is a comment above. How will the chain of insecure infrastructure + the data scrapers + the people responsible for configuration react?

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reported an issue to the LinkedIn competitor https://about.me two years ago where signing in with my Google credentials gives me access to some the account of some random other person with a similar name to me. I think that during registration, I attempted to register about.me/johnradio (except it's not "johnradio"), but he was already using it, and then the bug occurred that gave me this access. I randomly check e…

My gmail is my first initial followed by my last name. There are other people on this planet with same first initial and last name, some of whom seem to think that must be their email too, because I keep on getting emails where they used it to sign up for things.

Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1279/

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#436
post #148

Ugh. To whomever is currently wasting their time and effort on differential privacy, take a good long look.

Why? Interested in why you think differential privacy would make any difference... The fault here seems to be an open es server.

That is precisely my point. Differential privacy would NOT make any difference, and I was pointing the many folks who are working on it to the much simpler issues that are in fact being encountered in the field. This past IEEE S&P had quite a few theoretical privacy talks.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#437

It's a tragedy that all of this data was available to anyone in a public database instead of.... checks notes... available to anyone who was willing to sign up for a free account that allowed them 1,000 queries. It seems like PDL's core business model is irresponsible regarding their stewardship of the data they've harvested.

If your in Europe or California, I suggest sending both companies an erasure request: https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=peopledatalabs.com https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=oxydata.io Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of yourdigitalrights.org.

Can I use this on behalf my @company users HIBP has just emailed me about?

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#438
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get bank statements, job offers, party invitations, and lately a bunch of lets say very questionable email verifications from euro 'dating' sites- I've identified the guy in the UK but its too much (and getting embarrassing now) to keep forwarding his stuff to him. Downside of getting in early on popular email services.

> but its too much (and getting embarrassing now) to keep forwarding his stuff to him What amazes me is when I get misaddressed email, and I reply to say its misaddressed (and I'm not talking about automated services, I'm talking about obviously manually sent stuff), and my reply just gets ignored and the misaddressed email just keeps on coming.

Somebody keeps phoning me and leaving messages. They don't answer their own phone (or messages clearly). I even have a sarky voicemail now, you'd think they'd notice. Nope!

Lady, whoever you think is going to be at that funeral isn't getting that message.

I've no idea if they'll get disconnected now as I've blocked their number. Hope so maybe they'll notice then.

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