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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

#141

Post by qmanjamz »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

> Every insider I've spoken to said any FTC fine on Facebook under $10 billion would be seen as a massive win, showing firm won't face serious consequences for privacy violations. Wall St. seems to agree in response to news of $3-$5b settlement [$FB up 4% after hours] https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1121148735818358784

A $10 billion fine for the Cambridge Analytica "scandal" would be so far beyond reasonable as to merit criminal charges against Joseph Simons. $3 billion is already insanely ridiculously high.

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

#142

Post by murat124 »

joejohnson wrote: post #95

Yet the stock is up almost 10% in after hours trading... the fine is not nearly enough to discourage criminal wrongdoing. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/fb?ltr=1

Not only that but it looks more like government is asking for its cut of the profit FB has made.

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

#143

Post by CharlesColeman »

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

>> 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.

It's more likely that he just likes being powerful and in charge of something big. If he just "fucked off and retired" the power he'd wield would be much less.

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

#144

Post by taurath »

wnevets wrote: post #115
taurath wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gonna have to disagree. I think it would be way worse if we found out they were storing passwords were plaintext in the database in 2019. Even if the security implications are the same/worse, the policy/decision making of such a revelation would be beyond terrible. edit: To put it another way, remote code execution flaws are terrible but they can happen. However it would be way worse if someone put in a static userna…

As is the policy/decision making that results in logs having the passwords - you can still have very locked down database access. Logs tend to get spread around all sorts of systems, and access control for logs is almost ALWAYS lower than DB keys. They're also cached for search-ability on any number of elasticsearch or business intelligence platforms, so getting rid of them after the fact is even harder. At the very least its an equivalent problem.

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

#145

Post by tkxxx7 »

slg wrote: post #139
tkxxx7 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook isn't actively trying to harm their customers, they simply don't care about them. That is amoral not evil. Don't bend yourself out of shape. Actively, happily ignoring the evil you have caused and continue to cause is evil.

That isn't evil. You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil. You wouldn't call a person who kills someone in a no fault car accident evil. Evil isn't about results. It is about intent and motive. You can call Facebook a number of things from amoral to negligent or even criminal, but once you start talking about evilness you have to start judging their intentions and motives.

> That isn't evil. You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil. You wouldn't call a person who kills someone in a no fault car accident evil.

All of these things are no one's fault.

> Evil isn't about results. It is about intent and motive.

Exactly. Prioritizing profit at the cost of customers' well-being is a deliberate decision; if not, seeing that customers are harmed by your own, continued actions and doing nothing to change it is, to me, actively being evil. Your intent may not be exactly to harm, but you have no problem harming people to get there. There is no difference.

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

#146

Post by javagram »

therein wrote: post #105
tyingq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

LinkedIn did in fact have that as an explicit feature where users would insert their email password on LinkedIn’s website.

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/5204/email-pas...

> If your email provider doesn't support OAuth, you'll need to enter your email password before clicking Continue. LinkedIn will use your password only for a moment to authenticate your account. We don't store or save your email password during this process.

Facebook’s feature was similar I believe. Where they stumbled was connecting an email verification feature to the code written almost a decade ago for contact import.

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

#149

Post by remarkEon »

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…

> which can probably only be mitigated by breaking it up.

I think about this a lot with regard to Big Tech. For some companies it looks easy and obvious (e.g., Amazon spins off AWS). For Facebook is it really as obvious as "spin off Instagram"? I'm not really convinced of that. It seems like their power is so ingrained in Facebook itself that it's not immediately obvious what splicing off Instagram would do. What would we actually want to accomplish?

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

#150

Post by merpnderp »

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…

Inspector Javert, is that you? Going to lock me away forever for stealing bread to feed my sister's starving kids?
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