So this might explain why I've suddenly gotten a huge increase in SPAM text messages that know my name.
I like to error on the side of coincidence but holy shit I've gotten like 12 spam phone calls today and almost never get any
Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
101–110 of 160 posts
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#102I 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…
Sounds a bit like moving the goal posts to me.
You were able to opt out of phone books and they also didn't contain email and gender.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#103I 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…
> If anything I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable, and that's really what people have an issue with, but I don't think there's a great answer to that. I mean, it's one thing to say the front of my house is public info because anyone can come by and take a picture, but it sure feels different when a high resolution photo (or heck, video feed) can be posted online that is instantly available to billions of people.
From your example, it's another thing to have a high resolution photo or video feed of everyone's houses and to, say, send them ads for painting services if the trim looks out of shape.
I think the important thing to get in the public consciousness is that scale alone is sufficient to make information processing fundamentally different than a human interacting with a single data point. Looking up one person in the phone book and calling them or sending them a letter is different than scanning the entire book, robocalling everyone in it, and sending junk mail to all of them. The fact that the former is accepted and that the later is merely the former repeated a million times does not make the latter permissible. The former was accepted because the way the world worked meant that it was simply intractable - an economic nonstarter, a physical and logical impossibility, humanly infeasible - to abuse it into spamming a million people.
For another example, license plates are public, required to be visible on your vehicle on public roads. Prior to license plate scanning technology, a cop could have tailed a suspect and radioed their vehicle description and license plate to have other detectives and officers disperse to intersections and track a vehicle through a city, and depending on the nature of the problem, they could spend a few hundred dollars to dispatch a helicopter to chase it across the freeway. They could conceivably tail a non-suspect, but that wouldn't make any sense, they were constrained by limited resources to only use this ability for a select few vehicles. That was how the world worked. Later, automated license plate readers were developed. With cameras deployed across every intersection in a city, it would be feasible to track all motions of every vehicle at all times; it would likely be cheaper and easier to do so than one year's expenses of deploying personnel to do so manually.
That information should be considered public, because it obviously is, but what a person is allowed to do with public information should not be limited only by what they're able to do with it.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#104Facebook is having a very bad day today, You have this hack announced today, all their sites are apparently down due to a bgp issue they are dealing with, and then the bombshell allegations of them intentionally creating toxicity on their platform to enrich themselves at the expense of society. Zuck's world is slowly collapsing in on him, expect heavy regulation and the beginning of the end of facebook as we know it.
This is not a hack, it's web scraping.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And I don't think they had location/address, > though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure Same here. initially i too couldn't remember for sure. Then i remembered the scene from Terminator 2 (1991) in which it looks up Sarah Connor's phone-number and home-address in a phone-book! :-)
It was earlier - the 1984 movie (Terminator) had the scene where he rips out the page from the phone book, looking for the Sarah Connors listed there. :)
K-anonymity in action. (The only thing you need to do is change your name to someone else's name.)
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#106I 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…
> 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…
Home addresses were absolutely shown in Bell Telephone White Pages phone books delivered to just about every domicile in the USA each year; you could not opt out of receiving the White and Yellow pages, though for a fee you could be “unlisted” and not appear in them.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
LOL. I haven't come across you before today (so, not sure if this is a joke), but for the past few hours every social network has more active users than Facebook.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#108So this might explain why I've suddenly gotten a huge increase in SPAM text messages that know my name.
I like to error on the side of coincidence but holy shit I've gotten like 12 spam phone calls today and almost never get any
I started getting about 6 SPAM texts a day starting a few days ago AND they knew my name!
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the CEO of a social network with more active users than Facebook, I am very confident in my analysis.
LOL. I haven't come across you before today (so, not sure if this is a joke), but for the past few hours every social network has more active users than Facebook.
> for the past few hours every social network has more active users than Facebook
That's literally the joke.
Re: Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum
#110I honestly ask myself how the f Zuck has the guts and ego to still talk about a "metaverse" with a company and product so wrong, so poisonous and evil to humanity. I really can't wait to see him in jail already.
Any particular reason you think a metaverse is incompatible with an evil organization? The evil co. in Ready Player One, the movie, literally imprisoned people and used them for forced labor. (then, somehow, the CEO gets arrested by regular cops, lol).
> (then, somehow, the CEO gets arrested by regular cops, lol).
Because he had a gun in hand not because of his forced labor practices.