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Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#101

Post by shubhamjain »

It seems beside the "the bug bounty is far less than it would have sold for in the dark market" another meme has taken hold of HN. No matter how significant the fine is, there always be people clamoring how trivial it is compared to their revenues. It could have been $10B and you would hear the same thing. The only fine, then, worth slapping is one that bankrupts the entire company.

Facebook made ~$7B net income in 2018. Am I supposed to believe that $5B fine isn't going to affect them at all?

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#102

Post by lordnacho »

lucasmullens wrote: post #54
lordnacho wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? FB's value naturally changes by more that 1% on quite a lot of days each year, without this fine. Put it another way: if you took all of the daily market cap changes of FB's stock, but added -1% to one of them, could you pick out which one it was?

How does that make it not matter? My savings in the stock market do the same thing, but if I got a fine/bill that was 1% of my net worth, it would still be a huge deal.

If your net worth changes often randomly covered the fine amount, it is very different from if you were say a pensioner on a fixed income.

Having had days where NW changed by entire year's salaries, I can say it makes a huge difference to how you see it.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#103

Post by heavenlyblue »

munk-a wrote: post #72
fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a pretty trivial automated test for so many PHD's to miss: create_user('Bob', 'BobPassword123') assert "BobPassword123" not in logfile

Hrm, so you checked the apache access logs, or maybe an error log, what about the system logs? Does the login request spin up a bash script and pass the password to it? I don't think it's trivial to guarantee non-existence.

Run the deployment in docker, check every file changed in the container for it’s contents.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#104

Post by kodz4 »

beat wrote: post #62

Finding the right fine for actions like this is hard. On one hand, we (as a society) want it to hurt, to cause the company real pain. On the other hand, we don't want to actually destroy the company. This leads to a "cost of doing business" problem, where evil practices become a preferred path for management, if evil is sufficiently profitable. The underlying problem is that corporations are NOT people, whatever the…

The size of the forest fire matters. Facebook is probably the first company in history that can cause planet wide forest fires at scale and speed never possible before.

That said I think they finally get that, after a long period of total denial. Not because of the fines and regulatory action which have come too late, but just from all the unintended unignorable consequences that have pilled up.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#105

Post by therein »

tyingq wrote: post #68
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #23

Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick: 1) Prompting users to give Facebook their email passwords.[0] 2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1] 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] It's pretty impressive that a company could do something so brazenly malevolent and be confident that they will escape with no mo…

LinkedIn was caught harvesting people's contacts with dark patterns. They settled a class action suit for $13M.

They weren't using the cleartext password to scrape contacts, though, were they?

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#106

Post by wnevets »

taurath wrote: post #65
wnevets wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] in logs.

Which is the NUMBER ONE MOST BASIC rule of handling users confidential data. It reflects incredibly poorly on the engineering practices of Facebook that this managed to get through. It should be a criminal liability.

I'm not arguing this wasn't a bad thing but comment made it sound like they were storing plaintext passwords in the database circa 2002.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#108

Post by artursapek »

rock_hard wrote: post #97
artursapek wrote: post #74

Why doesn't Zuck just quit? He's so rich. I would have fucked off and retired so long ago.

I would guess because he truly cares about making the world more open and connected and issn't in it for the money. He also pledged to donate all his wealth along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet

I can't reconcile that with all of the evil shit Facebook does.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#109

Post by taurath »

esoterica wrote: post #46
ergothus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will not acknowledge any wrongdoing as part of the settlement This bugs the heck out of me (in general, not specific to this case). What is point of letting them claim innocence? How does this benefit the consumer? I can see occasional exceptions where it's clearly a case of misunderstandings so you don't want to bring down the full hammer...but I honestly can't remember more than one such case where someone DID ac…

If Facebook admits wrongdoing they will lose every lawsuit brought against them going forward, which means they will contest the charges instead of settling. The FTC doesn’t want that, because an actual court case means they might lose, which would be bad for the careers of everyone involved. They’d rather just take the guaranteed W by offering FB a palatable settlement.

Taking a bribe shouldn't be the best outcome for all involved.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#110

Post by taurath »

wnevets wrote: post #106
taurath wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the NUMBER ONE MOST BASIC rule of handling users confidential data. It reflects incredibly poorly on the engineering practices of Facebook that this managed to get through. It should be a criminal liability.

I'm not arguing this wasn't a bad thing but comment made it sound like they were storing plaintext passwords in the database circa 2002.

Storing them in logs is the same thing IMO. Logs are usually more easily accessible than a user database.
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