Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by firstfewshells » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 10:52 PM UTC

beatgammit wrote: post #164

scotchmi_st wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection. Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to maki…

Criminal prosecution for dog poo? You must be kidding me.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 10:52 PM UTC

beatgammit wrote: post #164

scotchmi_st wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection. Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to maki…

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 10:53 PM UTC

beatgammit wrote: post #164

scotchmi_st wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection. Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to maki…

Right.

That's like saying there's not a difference in involuntary manslaughter and murder.

There is. Intent is very important. That's WHY so many people focus on the intention.

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

#184

Post by asdffdsa » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 10:54 PM UTC

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?

Email password, of course. I give out my ssn for identification to various organizations. I NEVER give out my email password to anyone except my email provider

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

#185

Post by scotchmi_st » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 10:54 PM UTC

beatgammit wrote: post #164

scotchmi_st wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection. Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to maki…

> There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection.

But the point is that this assumes you're able to tell the difference between the two cases- intent is often a really hard thing to prove. And often discussions about whether Facebook acted in good faith when it did certain things neglect the fact that they made a big mess everywhere, that needs sorting out regardless of their intent.

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

#186

Post by l33tbro » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 10:55 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #23

Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick: 1) Prompting users to give Facebook their email passwords.[0] 2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1] 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] It's pretty impressive that a company could do something so brazenly malevolent and be confident that they will escape with no mo…

Is there anything left I can do to escape Facebook? This is just depressing for someone who was in college when FB came out and never signed up. Nor any other social network (still a favorite oxymoron) since.

What kind of a profile of me would they be able to glean from email? Whole thing feels so fucking invasive.

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

#187

Post by julianj » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

firstfewshells wrote: post #181

beatgammit wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection. Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to maki…

Criminal prosecution for dog poo? You must be kidding me.

Wouldn't the intentional smearing of feces over someones carpet throughout their home qualify as vandalism?

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

#188

Post by crakenzak » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 11:07 PM UTC

If Facebook is being charged this much for their (pretty serious) privacy issues, Equifax deserves to be shut down and have their lead executives face jail time.

I'm not defending Facebook, but I feel like whenever a huge financial instiitution does something, they're treated as a protected class, but other companies get hit pretty hard (justifiably)

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

#189

Post by fuzz4lyfe » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 11:08 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #177

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook hires some of the top software developers and engineers on the planet, if not leaking plaintext passwords is too high of an expectation for them then nothing that isn't public knowledge should ever be put into any computer system. As a profession we should demand our peers do better than this.

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

#190

Post by kurtisc » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 11:08 PM UTC

quickben wrote: post #98

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.

That gets me every time I read in the media about a 'bug' that enabled some complex data transfer. People, somebody has to decide, plan, code, test and deploy the behaviour, and make sure it works. And yet, people accept the explanation it seems without much thought.

The email contacts feature already existed but was disabled in the past, so it just needed to be a Boolean switch. Like anyone who uses Messenger, I can believe they could introduce a regression and never fix it.