What a broken product. There isn’t 1.5B users with public profiles in FB, so whatever methods these guys used clearly went beyond regular data scrapping.
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Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
41–50 of 160 posts
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#42Some might laugh this off as 'oh it's just scraping'. But I remember reading some comments in HN that there are apps that can scan faces and pull personal info including where they live, work etc. So each leak uncovers a person little by little. This vindicates the stance taken by Signal to not even collect metadata. Edit: I mean surreptitiously scan the face of a stranger you see in public and the app will tell you…
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI already does that too
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#43And some wonder why I'm not letting myself forced into dual authentication providing them with real phone number. Actually I am very reluctant to log into Facebook at all, twice a year perhaps seeing old friends making an attempt to communicate with me, then only from private browsing, perhaps VPN too. I do not trust them with any shred of additional info on me to that they do not have already from earlier.
I miss a lot of links sent to me pointing to facebook post or something, no, actually I do not miss a little thing, I rather do not care about cute animals or strange people or thoughts, it is invaluable in 99,999% of the cases, for the rest I can take the loss.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#44I feel like we need to start differentiating between "public" personal information and more sensitive personal information (like social security numbers or other government ID numbers). The breach lists this info: Name Email Location Gender Phone number User ID So basically, everything I used to be able to get in a phone book. Honestly, at this point all of that information should just be considered public, because i…
Couldn't a social security number be easily bruteforced anyway
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#45I don't consider my name, date of birth or the city I live in to be personal information.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everything I used to be able to get in a phone book Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.) > I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable This is it right here. The scale and ease of access are ter…
> Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.) you can opt out of Facebook too... and Irish phone books had addresses...
It's not just Facebook. Your phone is tattling on you 24/7. ALPRs are recording where you drive. Browser fingerprinting is creating a profile on you even if you block ads and trackers. Short of never using a computer, there is no opt out anymore.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#47I know everyone on HN loves to hate on Facebook, but the fact that HN's servers are getting crushed when FB is down perhaps shows a revealed preference.
It could be more than that. Vodafone broadband Internet (used to be UPC) is down in all of Czech Republic since about an hour. Their website is down (vodafone.cz), their mobile Internet seems slow. Coincidence?
If you change your DNS servers, it works! Their DNS servers probably crashed due to FB's DNS not resolving! (https://twitter.com/BlazejKrajnak)
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#48I'm glad I never gave FB my real phone number or birthday. Nobody should. I predicted this would happen some day. It's always just a matter of probability and time.
Do you have any friends that might have used any FB app? If so, chances are high they uploaded their contact list and FB has your name and phone number.
I mean, I usually just tell friends to call me on FB messenger (or WeChat) rather than giving them one of my 10+ phone numbers, so FB probably wouldn't have gotten it that way. I'm not on very many people's phone contact lists. The few that do have a virtual number that I can just change.
Name, yes, but that's public.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#49I feel like we need to start differentiating between "public" personal information and more sensitive personal information (like social security numbers or other government ID numbers). The breach lists this info: Name Email Location Gender Phone number User ID So basically, everything I used to be able to get in a phone book. Honestly, at this point all of that information should just be considered public, because i…
> and more sensitive personal information (like social security numbers)
Well I consider SSNs public knowledge at this stage. You can reliably dox anyone in the US now and find out their SSNs. Also: I used to have a sticker on my laptop that had my SSN on it, and brought it to conferences, as a PR stunt for my consultancy.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#50I know everyone on HN loves to hate on Facebook, but the fact that HN's servers are getting crushed when FB is down perhaps shows a revealed preference.
Or it could be as simple as everyone wants to discuss one of the biggest tech companies suffering such a massive outage, combined with the aforementioned FB-haters basking in this moment.
As the CEO of a social network with more active users than Facebook, I am very confident in my analysis.