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Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigation in N.Y.

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Re: Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigation in N.Y.

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they commit any crime? I do agree that fines are overused, but I don't think there's reason for sending anybody to prison on this case.

Why is Facebook anticipating a five billion dollar fine if they didn't break any laws?

Breaking laws is not the same as comiting crimes.

Re: Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigation in N.Y.

#102
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your are mixing things up.... In this situation the hacker is Facebook. Most of the other Facebook data breaches where they didn't secure data accordingly would compare more to what you refer to. This case is different though as Facebook performed unauthorized actions on email accounts, basically breaking in.

I am making a case for the OP's comment that Facebook may have made a genuine mistake by introducing this bug - like they literally called out in their statement. A bug is a bug. Whether it allows a hacker to sneak in to steal all your data or whether it allows a company to collect data it wasn't supposed to (as in this case Facebook specifically mentioned that it didn't turn off the feature though it intended to).

> in this case Facebook specifically mentioned that it didn't turn off the feature though it intended to

What you are describing here is in fact a lack of action, or a lack of change policy (to cause such action). That's not a bug. A bug is unintentional behaviour of some code, not some folk who've said they'll do something, but then don't.

And as for whether the original behaviour is/was a bug is also a point of contention too: that's a lot of willfully bad behaviour that's got chained together somehow to do what it did, then reviewed, signed off, and deployed — that's quite some 'accident' — I write code, and to me this whole thing just smells of a cover-up (by FB calling this a 'bug', when it very much looks to be otherwise).

Re: Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigation in N.Y.

#103

This might have been an honest mistake. To do this for 1.5M users only when Facebook's user-base runs into billions might indicate that.

> To do this for 1.5M users only when Facebook's user-base runs into billions

Well, put like that, it sounds just like they did it as a planned A/B test strategy (like they do to trial other features) — and, personally, I believe this to be the case.

Deploying such code/functionality is hardly an accident/bug.

Re: Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigation in N.Y.

#105
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

what are you some kind of fascist

Ok, since you don't seem to want to use this site as intended, I've banned the account. If that changes, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban anyone who gives us reason to believe they'll follow the site guidelines in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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