Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 331 posts

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

#171

Post by bhandziuk »

killyp wrote: post #83
athenot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a lawyer but intent appears to play a big role. A company that is negligent or incompetent will always face a lesser repercussion than one who acts deliberately. Now of course this is not to exonerate Equifax whose entire premise rests on safeguarding sensitive information. From the consumer side, the 2 incidents are equally bad.

Not that I completely disagree with you, but lets not pretend that leaking SSN is equivalent to possibly leaking emails and passwords. One of those is far more important than the others. There was also tons of evidence of insider trading by Equifax execs. If anything the Equifax stuff proved to me that the American public doesn't care about privacy and so neither should investors.

Which one are you saying is more sensitive: my ssn or my email password?

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

#172

Post by _cs2017_ »

wavefunction wrote: post #162
_cs2017_ wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I misread, but none of the articles linked above suggest any malicious intent. Could you clarify what specifically you're referring to?

Making money off "mistakes" that keep happening, darn it!

I don't think they can make money off plain text passwords? They can only lose money from that, if it's discovered and they are fined and lose some users.

They can make money from contact lists, but IIUC the article said they didn't use the contact lists. Also, given that it only affected a couple million users (like 0.1% of their user base), the damage to their reputation would far outweigh any benefits of actually using those contact lists.

On the last item, the collection of email passwords, the only benefit would be if they actually use those passwords to get information, so the above point covers it.

Let me know if I'm missing something.

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

#173

Post by ergothus »

ABCLAW wrote: post #52
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…

>What is point of letting them claim innocence? It changes the evidentiary basis of future claims on related grounds. The admission opens them up to other legal risks outside of the current dispute. Maybe European regulators want to slap them for the same fact pattern (same facts, different jurisdiction). Maybe a class action is put together (same facts, different plaintiffs). Maybe they have an HR suit for unlawful…

> It changes the evidentiary basis of future claims on related grounds

Well that's interesting...citation? I thought not admitting any wrongdoing meant that you didn't admit it, meaning that there'd be no lower bar for anything, related grounds or not.

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

#174

Post by badrequest »

beager wrote: post #130
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

In other words, market rewards Facebook for being fined only $5 billion by increasing their market cap $20 billion. Unreal.

as it so turns out, you can't rely on capitalism to even have any morality, much less enforce one

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

#175

Post by munk-a »

Aunche wrote: post #127
beat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The passwords in plaintext wasn't a breach or a leak. If you punish Facebook for it, they would be less inclined to share such information in the future.

If we can't trust a company to audit themselves fairly (in fact, we can't generally) then they should bear the burden of paying for an external audit of their processes, many "boring" industries have these sorts of requirements.

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

#176

Post by paxy »

crushcrashcrush wrote: post #17
product50 wrote: post #13

Before this thread becomes a Facebook bashing session, please keep in mind that Equifax leaked all your SSN data along with names and addresses and got away with no fines.

Leaking this data wasn't an intrinsic part of their business model.

It is, even more so than Facebook. Buying and selling your personal financial data is Equifax's entire business.

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

#177

Post by stickfigure »

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #140
noselasd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until someone turned on logging of the full request body on the load balancer/proxy or otherwise unknown-to-you middlebox that was the TLS termination point in production that you did not know about

So their incompetence lies in lacking configuration management in production as opposed to a lack of testing? Why are they manually configuring production servers anyway at that scale?

You speak with the hubris of a man that's never been in the arena.

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

#178

Post by r3bl »

esoterica wrote: post #48
blihp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That misses the point: it's effectively a (cheap) speeding ticket for bad behavior over the life of the company. It would be a bargain at twice the price from their point of view.

1 month of pay is a lot more than a speeding ticket.

Finland, Switzerland, and the UK are the first three places that pop into my mind where speeding tickets are calculated based on the income of the offender.

You'd have to be caught going way above the limit to be fined above 1 month of pay, but it's possible.

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

#180

Post by parthdesai »

bhandziuk wrote: post #171
killyp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I completely disagree with you, but lets not pretend that leaking SSN is equivalent to possibly leaking emails and passwords. One of those is far more important than the others. There was also tons of evidence of insider trading by Equifax execs. If anything the Equifax stuff proved to me that the American public doesn't care about privacy and so neither should investors.

Which one are you saying is more sensitive: my ssn or my email password?

Is that even a question? guess what is needed when you go apply for mortgage?
Post reply on HN