The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
about.fb.com
The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
1–10 of 60 posts
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#2Facebook is using doublespeak here.
> It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019.
.. a couple paragraphs later ::
> We believe the data in question was scraped from people’s Facebook profiles by malicious actors using our contact importer prior to September 2019.
Gee, that sounds a lot like someone abused your contact importer tool to do something you didn't intend for it to do. Which is also the definition of other "hacks", like SQL injection
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#3Like when they used to show your name & profile picture after a failed login with just an email and empty password. Aside from being another inadvertant information leak, it would have been tragic if that was part of an attempt to decrease the (deliberate) login failure rates.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#4This is like your bank saying it's not their fault your money was stolen because someone took it away without permission. The point is that Facebook has a responsibility to keep the data you provide them secure. But the purpose of this press release is to make this responsibility seem either trivial or nonexistent.
You can show them that this responsibility is paramount. Stop giving them your data.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#5Like when they used to show your name & profile picture after a failed login with just an email and empty password. Aside from being another inadvertant information leak, it would have been tragic if that was part of an attempt to decrease the (deliberate) login failure rates.
I had this only a few weeks ago. Is that 'feature' removed now?
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#6The attitude that this company (and many others) has towards the data they collect from billions of people is stunning. They claim that there was nothing they could do, even when one of their tools was misused to gather phone numbers. They don't take accountability for the fact that this likely already has and will continue to enable spammers and scammers to much more easily target their users. They refuse to send out notifications to affected users (which they should have done 2 years ago). We need legislation punishing companies for being negligent with the sensitive user data they collect or this shit is never going to end.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#7Facebook is using doublespeak here. > It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019. .. a couple paragraphs later :: > We believe the data in question was scraped from people’s Facebook profiles by malicious actors using our contact importer prior to September 2019. Gee, that sounds a lot like someone…
right, they make it sound like it was publicly available data, but it was data unintentionally made public.
Sort of like saying "people scraped publicly available information from our website" when someone grabs passwords from a public-facing MongoDB database without a password.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#8Facebook is using doublespeak here. > It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019. .. a couple paragraphs later :: > We believe the data in question was scraped from people’s Facebook profiles by malicious actors using our contact importer prior to September 2019. Gee, that sounds a lot like someone…
It reminds me of their Cambridge Analytica defense. Create an Open API, make all the data available to anyone who signs up for an API key, document and market the methods for extracting the data, define its boundaries and limitations, build a platform around it, and then claim you're the victim when one of your users does something bad with the data you gave them.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#9Facebook is using doublespeak here. > It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019. .. a couple paragraphs later :: > We believe the data in question was scraped from people’s Facebook profiles by malicious actors using our contact importer prior to September 2019. Gee, that sounds a lot like someone…
I thought the same thing. Is there another explanation for what this might mean?
Scraping to me is what google does, exploring links, saving and parsing data.
The contact importer presumably sourced data from iOS, google, outlook or similar address books.
You shouldn’t normally get data out that way, was it returning unexpected results from partial matches?
Maybe you could view a profile page by uploading an address book with partial, stubbed data. This page that then normally wouldn’t have been accessible to the user then was and those and any connected profiles were then crawled and scraped?
It seems to me you used to be able to view an otherwise private profile if the person had extended a friend request.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#10Like when they used to show your name & profile picture after a failed login with just an email and empty password. Aside from being another inadvertant information leak, it would have been tragic if that was part of an attempt to decrease the (deliberate) login failure rates.
I had this only a few weeks ago. Is that 'feature' removed now?
Oh, wow. I can confirm that said "feature" is still live. People's names and profile pictures show up after entering their email address in the login form shrug