I thought US Court of Appeals established that web scraping is legal?
The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
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Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#22Facebook 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…
Facebook has some of the worst and most disgusting ethics in tech. I feel repulsed that they are in the same industry I work in.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#23My phone number was removed and my account deleted when they say this hack happened. My phone number is in the leak. Doesn that mean that my phone number was in it because other people's contacts were imported, or because they didn't actually delete my info?
The contact importer should not be turning up deleted Facebook accounts, so it seems like Facebook was keeping data on you even after you deleted your account.
If you are an EU resident, this can be a GDPR violation so you should follow up.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#24I thought US Court of Appeals established that web scraping is legal?
AFAIK the phone numbers were obtained via an account recovery exploit, not through scraping. The other fields were though.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#25> The information did not include financial information, health information or passwords.
As someone who has an account (begrudgingly for Messenger since you can't solely use a phone number anymore) but doesn't use it, can I just say:
Wait, what?! Since when does Facebook have health information!
I don't know conceptually what portion of Facebook they're referring to but that's news to me.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#26Facebook 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…
> Gee, that sounds a lot like someone abused your contact importer tool to do something you didn't intend for it to do.
From the article it appears that the contact importer is an API endpoint which returns a set of Facebook profiles given a set of phone numbers. In that sense, it did exactly what the developer intended.
If I write a script to query google.com and get a response back you could say I'm not using google search as intended, but most software engineers would laugh at me if I claimed to have "hacked" Google in this way.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#27Deleting my Facebook account has been one of the most mentally liberating and satisfying decision I have made in the last year. I used a Chrome addon to totally delete every post and clear everything out too--why let them have anything even when I'm gone.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#28> The information did not include financial information, health information or passwords. As someone who has an account (begrudgingly for Messenger since you can't solely use a phone number anymore) but doesn't use it, can I just say: Wait, what?! Since when does Facebook have health information! I don't know conceptually what portion of Facebook they're referring to but that's news to me.
One source of health information Facebook might have is the Oculus Move app (which tracks exercise in VR)
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#29Facebook 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…
> Gee, that sounds a lot like someone abused your contact importer tool to do something you didn't intend for it to do. From the article it appears that the contact importer is an API endpoint which returns a set of Facebook profiles given a set of phone numbers. In that sense, it did exactly what the developer intended. If I write a script to query google.com and get a response back you could say I'm not using googl…
See this from Sep, 2019: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/09/12/new-insta...
"Facebook confirmed to me that the vulnerability was genuine, that the exploit would enable a “bad actor” to connect phone numbers and user details, and that it has prompted changes to be made. They pointed out to me that the exploit process is “complex,” but nonetheless did leave the platform open to abuse and put users at risk."
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#30Facebook 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…
> Gee, that sounds a lot like someone abused your contact importer tool to do something you didn't intend for it to do. From the article it appears that the contact importer is an API endpoint which returns a set of Facebook profiles given a set of phone numbers. In that sense, it did exactly what the developer intended. If I write a script to query google.com and get a response back you could say I'm not using googl…
> In that sense, it did exactly what the developer intended.
Not sure they envisioned someone enumerating phone numbers and pulling all data. But that would be hilarious if they claim that's what they intended and that was a feature.