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

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

#351

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

b212 wrote: post #328
banana_giraffe wrote: post #272

Looking at the leak others have pointed to, there are a surprising number of people working in a particular imaginary company: sqlite> select company, count(*) as c from usa where length(company) > 0 group by company order by c desc limit 10; company c ---------------------------------------- ---------- Self-Employed 459119 Facebook 181013 Retired 71210 The Krusty Krab 61550 Hollister Co. 42304 U.S. Army 39682 Stay-a…

Could you please tell me how did you convert it to sqlite? I've got a huge 1 GB txt file that crashes my comp every time I try to search for myself there :( Thank you!

I suggest using a shell program like grep (or even the search feature of less), as shell programs are notoriously good at lazily seeking through files to keep memory use low.

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

#352

Post by donalhunt »

mrweasel wrote: post #229
anticristi wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds interesting. Shall we call it "GDPR"?

Honestly the EU need to finans a organisation to deal with GDPR violation, hell it could finans it self. The GDPR is the single best piece of legislation ever written, in term of privacy, but enforcement is lacking.

They already do. The Data Protection Commissioners in each state are growing rapidly to try and tackle the volume of work.

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

#353

Post by mopsi »

ourcat wrote: post #326
ubertoop wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary thing is how much ones phone number (a somewhat ephemeral thing) is actually bound to your IDENTITY. Considering your phone number is more and more being used in 2FA ... if you were to ever change your number and someone else got it, this would pose a serious security risk if you failed to change over ALL of your internet accounts 2FA to the new number.

I've always thought the most scary thing about this practice is that your (unique) phone number is a powerful "foreign key" which could potentially join data from many other leaked databases, forming an even larger dataset on you. There are plently of other places we give our phone numbers to, which might not have anywhere near the protections that Facebook say they provide.

Absolutely, and e-mail or Paypal account name too. Neither of them are trivial to change. If you try to create a new account for each thing at a generic mail provider such as Gmail, your accounts will be shut down by automatic abuse filters. If you roll your own domain, then, well... the domain becomes the foreign key.

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

#354

Post by donalhunt »

Nextgrid wrote: post #71
kristianc wrote: post #43

Interested to know the GDPR implications of this for Facebook. This seems like one of those occasions where the regulator might be tempted to impose the maximum fine…

See my other comments on this thread about Facebook's situation with the GDPR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26682200 Long story short, regulators already have more than enough evidence about Facebook's lack of GDPR compliance so they could've already imposed large fines if they wanted to. The fact that it hasn't happened yet shows there's no motivation to actually enforce the regulation.

I believe there are still open investigations.

But Facebook have enough money and lawyers to ensure a plea deal is agreed. We work out as nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

All the big tech companies budget for these fines. You'll often see it called out at earnings where they allocate funds for a particular fine in a given quarter even though the investigation isn't finalised.

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

#355

Post by smdyc1 »

malaya_zemlya wrote: post #110
Exuma wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://t.me/freedomf0x/12553 I haven't checked the content myself, but this tg channel is usually legit

Were there any leaks of Australian data? I can only see Austria in pastebin (spelling mangled as Austriaia)

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

#356

Post by pessimizer »

henadzit wrote: post #232
tnolet wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European here. What are these bot calls exactly? Never had one as I guess it’s forbidden where I live.

Telemarketing or political campaigns. Check out the Robocall article on wiki. In Europe it depends on the country. In Poland I receive a few calls daily but they are people calling me, not bots. Never received a robocall here.

In the US, the vast majority of them are simple frauds. For a year I got a robocall every few days from a Chinese woman (in Chinese) that a friend of mine said is a threat to get (the hypothetical Chinese immigrant) me deported unless I pay them.

Right now I'm getting a fake credit card debt collection call (I've never had a credit card in my life, only debit), and a call telling me that I'm eligible to have my AT&T (phone) bill halved (I don't have AT&T phone service) and all I have to do is call the number "on my caller ID." I think those two are both being read by the same woman (not the Chinese one.)

I'm more of a texter than a caller, so the vast majority of calls I get are robocall frauds. I'd love to get a robocall that was just annoying for a change, rather than completely predatory.

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

#357

Post by spondyl »

xtracto wrote: post #349
anonymousiam wrote: post #70

The root of the problem is not the privacy policy or the system security. The root of the problem is the collection itself. All large businesses, health care providers, and governments maintain databases. Every one of them will eventually be leaked. All it takes is a corruptible trusted insider.

This. I don't trust in the government, but I think digital "personal data" should be only available for "confirmation" to companies that need it. Say, a government entity could have an API that allow you to send hashed personal data that they can verify is right. This way companies will ask the user for their data and hash it client-side. Then they can send the hashes (hashed with a custom provided salt to the entity…

Wouldn't this fall down as soon as someone enters your details with the wrong casing or uses a +country code rather than a localised phone number and so on?

Humans will error and enter data incorrectly so the hash would be different every time potentially despite being "correct" to a human at a glance?

You could standardise everything (lowercase etc) but I imagine there are country and regional edge cases such as capitalisation having meaning in a given language (I can imagine it being a thing but I don't know it for sure)

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

#358

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

r721 wrote: post #124

Liz Bourgeois, @Facebook comms: >This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019. https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1378398011747938305

It's not "old data" it's our data and Liz is a fucking idiot. They lost a total of 533 Million peoples. The company should be shut down and management yeeted into the sun.

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

#359

Post by throwmusic2366 »

b212 wrote: post #328
banana_giraffe wrote: post #272

Looking at the leak others have pointed to, there are a surprising number of people working in a particular imaginary company: sqlite> select company, count(*) as c from usa where length(company) > 0 group by company order by c desc limit 10; company c ---------------------------------------- ---------- Self-Employed 459119 Facebook 181013 Retired 71210 The Krusty Krab 61550 Hollister Co. 42304 U.S. Army 39682 Stay-a…

Could you please tell me how did you convert it to sqlite? I've got a huge 1 GB txt file that crashes my comp every time I try to search for myself there :( Thank you!

Does it open with Geany?

https://www.geany.org/

It's FLOSS. Available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

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

#360

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

varispeed wrote: post #317
esnard wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019." https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1378398417450377222

What a pathetic response. Does it mean users changed where they live? Change their names? Deleted and started a new account so the ID is different?

> Deleted.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I "deleted my account" in the run-up to the 2016 election, because I could see how social media was being manipulated, and what it is doing to society. And I mean I _deleted_ it. I took the extra steps of researching how to REALLY delete it; not just suspend it.

A couple years later, I needed to get a new account to help admin a page. You can guess where this is going. I tried my usual email -- since it should be free, and it was deleted, right? And... what do you know? Everything was still there. All my posts. All my connections. Everything.

Facebook never deletes anything.

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