Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 524 posts

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

#141

Post by anticristi »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #92
mrweasel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds interesting. Shall we call it "GDPR"?

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

#142

Post by Moeancurly »

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #83
cblconfederate wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point i don't see why only facebook and the thieves should have access to this data. If the data is public it loses its value

What about this data being public causes it to lose value? It seems like it would be a boon for lots of companies even if every other company has it.

I believe they mean it can't effectively be sold if everyone has it. It loses value as a commodity if anyone can access it, but the value of the data is still in tact.

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

#143

Post by Barrin92 »

rpastuszak wrote: post #119

I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we still ok with this shit? The sooner we get rid of the cancer that FB is, the better. I didn’t share my contact book with FB apps either. It was probably her—a person in her 70s, not necessarily experienced with tech. The main reason this company exists, or that…

> is the lack of informed consent.

what's making it possible is the lack of privacy regulation. People by and large don't care enough about privacy,it's too diffuse, too complicated, the damage to oneself and others is too intangible etc.

Only way to end this is to destroy the business models that make it possible. What stands in the way of it is the mindset that this somehow harms innovation. (Innovating who can drive the titanic faster into the iceberg isn't innovation), that the government has no right to regulate private companies, and so on. The main problem is that people are trying to incrementally fix a broken thing, as Peter Ducker said

"There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter"

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

#144

Post by mhh__ »

gpm wrote: post #101

Is it possible to download this without giving money to criminals? (The article says free, but my 2 minutes of googling hasn't found it, somewhat unsurprisingly). Is doing so legal? If the answer to both of those questions are yes... I'd like to take a peak. Mostly to check whether or not some numbers I know haven't been directly give to fb are there.

Yes. Legal? no idea.

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

#145

Post by Nextgrid »

yabadubakta wrote: post #138
rpastuszak wrote: post #119

I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we still ok with this shit? The sooner we get rid of the cancer that FB is, the better. I didn’t share my contact book with FB apps either. It was probably her—a person in her 70s, not necessarily experienced with tech. The main reason this company exists, or that…

Once people accept that there’s no such thing as a free (as in beer) app or service. In addition to there needs to be serious laws put in place that gives users control of their data. And they should be getting paid for facebooks profits—not the share holders.

The problem is less about whether people accept to pay for services and more that it's currently more profitable to provide ad-supported services (paid for by non-consensual data collection) than paid ones.

Regulation that forbids non-consensual data collection such as the GDPR ought to fix that, but its lack of enforcement means it didn't have any effect on the market. Once regulation starts being enforced, it will rebalance the market where paid services will start to be viable because free services would no longer be profitable.

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

#146

Post by Nextgrid »

yoaviram wrote: post #127
rpastuszak wrote: post #119

I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we still ok with this shit? The sooner we get rid of the cancer that FB is, the better. I didn’t share my contact book with FB apps either. It was probably her—a person in her 70s, not necessarily experienced with tech. The main reason this company exists, or that…

Suggest you send Facebook a CCPA or GDPR data deletion request (even if you don't live in California or the EU) for your real identity. Cases like yours is why we created https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/facebook.com , which makes its dead simple to send such requests. Free & open source.

Note that Facebook happily ignores Subject Access Requests with complete impunity: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

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

#147

Post by xyst »

I removed my phone number from Facebook when it was reported that Facebook used this as some sort of tracking mechanism across third party vendors - specifically with purchases from merchants - in order to serve more "relevant ads". From what I recall, if the merchant is somehow hooked up into FB APIs then regardless of whether you signed up for their rewards program using an e-mail + password or via FB SSO, then they would send back "anonymized" data back to FB for each purchase(s).

I wonder if my phone number still persists (aka "soft delete")

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

#148

Post by anticristi »

poqegjrioe wrote: post #113
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #42

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

I work in the security field and let me tell you something I realized: nobody cares about security. If someone cares about security, it's because they've had many many incidents in the past. We humans are not a species that is good at preventing, we are good at reacting. the security handbook[^1] has a chapter on that actually, and they basically say that role playing is the only way of not getting burned. Humans are…

I think part of the problem is that many orgs see security as an overhead that engineers do to sleep well at night. A few more breaches, a few more fines and it will finally be seen as a feature to keep the CEO out of jail.
Post reply on HN