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533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

businessinsider.com

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Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#91

Post by procombo »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #59
rikkipitt wrote: post #5

I’ve been getting a lot of automated/unsolicited calls recently. Begs the question if this might be the source of my woes. Is there a trustworthy phone number version of https://haveibeenpwned.com ?

Not really an answer to your question, but one partial solution to the problem of having your number leaked or sold is to setup a service like Twilio to act like a phone proxy. You can have Twilio forward calls it receives on a different number ("spam number") to your actual phone number ("real number"). You provide spam number to anyone who isn't a business or personal contact. Every few months, you rotate spam numb…

It's what I have done for years. Only costs $1/mo for the number and a couple hours learning their API.

Your existing cell number can be ported over to Twilio if you are patient.

The only problem is trying to use the number for 2fa. A growing number of banks (like Capital One) block Twilio services from recieving their SMS.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#92

Post by BoiledCabbage »

mrweasel wrote: post #75
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #42

Don’t worry, Facebook will soon put out a press release including the phrase “we need to do better.”

That kinda sad, because that is what’s going to happen and then we’ll nothing more. At this point I’m not really sure what it will take for companies, like Facebook, to understand that you need to not fuck around with peoples private data.

Put a monetary cost of holding user data, and a steep monetary cost on losing user data.

Ex, pay x amount per month in perpetuity for each piece of information about a user your keep. And have to pay the "net present value" of those payments if you lose the data.

Having to pay for hoarding user personal data changes the incentives from gobble up as much as possible, to instead only pay for a users data that is worth the cost to your business.

And as an extra incentive to not hold unneeded user data, know the costs you'd pay if it was breached.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#93

Post by Guest42 »

macintux wrote: post #58
hourislate wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sick that they are allowed to get away with this. It's basically a botnet stealing information.

Every time someone argues that people can avoid the privacy problems of Facebook by simply not using it, I point out this issue (plus the shadow accounts).

I recently purchased a phone that had the Facebook app preinstalled. If I had to guess, the mere act of connecting to WiFi caused a whole slew of info to get sent.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#97

Post by progval »

amluto wrote: post #48
londons_explore wrote: post #28

Looks like this is the "To match users to their friends by phone number, you need an API which can take as input a phone number, and return information about if that number has an associated account" problem. There is no way to let a user find their friends on a service without such an API. Yet if you have such an API, someone can simply brute force all phone numbers worldwide (there are only 10^10), and now they hav…

This is the same fallacy that leads to apps asking for permission to access your whole picture library. Facebook could have an API by which an app can prompt its user to show a list of all of that user’s friends who have the app installed. The app would only learn the identities of people whom the user explicitly selects, and phone numbers would not be part of that identity.

It works for photos because the threat model is about protecting local files against malicious apps.

But for phone numbers, you about protecting Facebook API (which is publicly available via the internet) against arbitrary devices, which Facebook has no way to tell from legitimate ones

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#98

Post by Exuma »

timdaub wrote: post #33

Great, and while you can get sued into oblivion for downloading a Metallica album, all our personal data is downloadable from a public website for 3€. Like for real, it took me 2mins to find the leak myself...

Where did you get the data leak, I want to check too.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#99

Post by reddotX »

Guest42 wrote: post #93
macintux wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time someone argues that people can avoid the privacy problems of Facebook by simply not using it, I point out this issue (plus the shadow accounts).

I recently purchased a phone that had the Facebook app preinstalled. If I had to guess, the mere act of connecting to WiFi caused a whole slew of info to get sent.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#100

Post by dan-robertson »

Obviously it is bad if your personal data is compromised after you (or some else) upload it to an online service like Facebook.

But in this case, it’s important to remember that phone companies used to regularly leak most of their customer’s phone numbers (and names) in the form of a telephone directory. So a question to consider is: suppose that the white pages were still commonly produced and contained most people’s numbers. How would you then feel about something like this.

Personally I feel like the problem with phone numbers being leaked is mostly the epidemic of spam calls (especially in the US) rather than some particular breach of privacy.

Aside: I think it is good to consider these counterfactuals in general for questions about information privacy, for example how would you feel if everyone’s tax returns were published publicly like they are in Sweden?

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