Facebook privacy fuckup reveals who has your number in their phone

Phone numbers and addresses are fast becoming like email addresses. In the same way that you can assume putting your email address into any website form that requests it will eventually result in spam, putting your phone number into any phone or your address into the database of any service provider will eventually result in a "leak".

We are to the point that to maintain any semblance of privacy, you need at least two email accounts (one you don't mind getting spammed), two phone numbers (one you don't care about facebook and others tracking) and two addresses (a mailing address/box service and your actual physical address).

"People who have you in their email contacts - and have imported them to Facebook - are probably suggested to you too."

I noticed this behavior when I signed up to test this first using an old email address. It had known friends as suggestions as well as people who had already requested to be my friend, including my actual profile. I don't explicitly remember important my email contacts but it is a possibility.

Looks like it treats both contact books the same, even if a user didn't add the individual contacts at the time of import, it keeps a record of them to potential make suggestions at some future point in time.

> A company doesn't have a single conscience.

And because of that we should hold it with less responsibility than a single person? Even though it holds an order of magnitude more power than a single person?

Yeah, how about, no.

And about your other remark, that is nonsense. It is very possible to keep those checks to a reasonable level of responsibility and many corporations do so, with proper software engineering principles, without "turning into Microsoft".

When dealing with people's private information, one should err on the side of caution, not on the side of $$$, and it is obvious which route facebook took.

In fact, they are already in violation of several EU privacy laws, just because their privacy-pissing database has grown out of hand, they collect more data than they have the internal corporate infrastructure for to deal with this amount of private data of EU citizens in a legal manner in Europe. They went way overboard, maybe not in the US, but they are also incorporated in the EU and cannot oblige by our privacy laws because they collected too much data.

As far as I'm concerned, Facebook is on the verge of criminal negligence as EU laws for citizen privacy are concerned. So personally, yeah, I think nothing wrong with headlines of "Facebook privacy fuckup", as long as they're behaving like that, singular conscience or not.

That's why we have such laws, to keep corporations responsible.

> It will be interesting if we get to where Facebook is required to send a pamphlet to your house explaining how they use the information they collect about you, who they sell it to, etc.

Actually, they are, in the EU.

Well not literally with a pamphlet, of course, they are required to send you a CD with this data on request.

Except that they're (illegally) refusing to provide most of that data under the guise of "intellectual property" (whose? not theirs, under any legal definition of IP I'm aware of) and "trade secrets" (which I'm sure won't hold up).

They just provide the profile and your comments and messages and whatnot kinds of data that are all already visible in some sense or other, on Facebook.

They do not provide the invisible data, the things they collect behind the scenes, such as what data they collect from your phonebook, what data is available about you being tagged in photos, things like that, all the data you know Facebook is collecting (due to deduction from friend suggestions, or just because it's there), but never really get to see because it's either a) buried behind some algorithms (friend suggestions) or b) just stored and not really used for anything.

These two kinds of data are EXACTLY what this EU Privacy law is intended for. The right for EU citizens to know what data about them is being stored especially when it is not immediately obvious that this data is being collected, stored or used in some manner.

These two kinds of data are also EXACTLY what Facebook is withholding from EU citizens legal requests because of "trade secrets". It won't hold up. I really hope it won't.

Their reasoning for why something is a "trade secret" is the same reason why a law exists that requires them to provide that data: because the data is not used in the open and otherwise EU citizens would not be able to know this data is being collected and stored about them.

Remember, the privacy laws protect the fact already that certain data is just stored, not even whether it is used or not.

I bet there's many kinds of data FB is simply storing about its users that it doesn't really use yet, data they should have provided on formal request but declined to do so because of "trade secrets".

i'm indian and i have several friends with fake names.