Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

about.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 60 posts

Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

#11

Post by tmpz22 »

sour-taste wrote: post #6

The 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 ou…

Data they collect by abusing android and other permission systems, reading contacts in adjacent apps like WhatsApp, etc. Its gluttony that they are now pretending is a moral high ground.

Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

#12

Post by kristofferR »

yellowyacht wrote: post #2

Facebook 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 also claimed that the only leaked data was "old data", phone numbers from 2019...

Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

#13

Post by TechBro8615 »

In the OP press release they say:

> 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.

But if you click on the "related post" at the bottom of the page, "Taking Legal Action Against Data Scraping" (Oct 2020) [0], you'll see this sentence:

> Scraping is a form of data collection that relies on unauthorized automation for the purpose of extracting data from a website or app.

It would be interesting to hear Facebook PR team describe the difference between "Hacking" and "Unauthorized Automation", and why apparently the latter is nothing to worry about now, but was sufficient to generate lawsuits in October.

[0] https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/taking-legal-action-agains...

Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

#14

Post by throwaway1777 »

jszymborski wrote: post #7
yellowyacht wrote: post #2

Facebook 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.

The data was from people’s public profiles, it’s not unintentionally public. the issue was making it scrapable.

Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

#15

Post by deepspace »

> "We’re focused on protecting people’s data by working to get this data set taken down".

I am sorry but that ship has sailed. I have already received several spam messages at the unique email address I used only for Facebook login, so the data has been spread very wide at this point.

Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

#17

Post by kristofferR »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #14
jszymborski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The data was from people’s public profiles, it’s not unintentionally public. the issue was making it scrapable.

No, the phone numbers and emails weren't publicly posted (globe icon), they were just meant to discover contacts.

Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data

#19

Post by VectorLock »

kristofferR wrote: post #12
yellowyacht wrote: post #2

Facebook 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 also claimed that the only leaked data was "old data", phone numbers from 2019...

2 years is nothing in the age of mobile numbers that people port and keep for practically decades.
Post reply on HN