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

Post by beat » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

kodz4 wrote: post #104

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.

Post by noselasd » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #94

munk-a wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't think it's trivial to guarantee non-existence. I disagree in this case. Log messages don't spontaneously appear in arbitrary places. If the developers understand what their software is doing and how their systems are configured then they should know where to check for the logging messages.

Post by slg » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

scotchmi_st wrote: post #112

monsieurbanana wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ashamed to say that up until now, when I saw Facebook (or similar) acting evil I thought about the quote, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Well, fuck that and fuck me, those people are not idiots, they're criminals.

Not to contradict your overall sentiment, but people often focus on intention with these issues. I think that's wrong. Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet. We need to be more dispassionate…

Post by Aunche » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #75

munk-a wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a small business - I get it, it's good to whitelist whatever information you're logging explicitly, but for smaller teams a hard to diagnose issue might lead the team to "log everything so we can sort it out later". Facebook is Facebook, whether this decision was the product of the corporation as a whole, a small dev team, or a highly paid consultant/third party, Facebook is a big enough company that they d…

I've worked for multiple Fortune 25 companies, and that excuse does not fly. Not in banking or healthcare, where breaches of privacy/confidentiality are actually illegal, rather than merely distasteful. Small teams and careless devs doing that sort of bad logging will be caught and corrected by strict security oversight. This is the sort of thing that leads the HN crowd to sneer at the old, slow ways of the enterpris…

Post by Loughla » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #76

Dangeranger wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This small of a fine comes off as a cost of doing business for a company as large as Facebook.

This isn't the future I wanted.