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Seems to suggest that FB platform apis were designed to not share any privacy metadata with devs. Maybe not the same as how apps like At The Pool stored that data, but might explain the firehose of data that FB gave devs and now they will point the finger and say it was their fault for these leaks/breaches. Food for thought.
Unfortunately, Facebook had a fundamental misunderstanding of how privacy has to work, and their users will be paying for their error for years. If it's earth-shatteringly bad for your users if their private data is leaked by a third-party, you cannot exfiltrate that data to a thrid-party. Full stop. No amount of policy un-leaks data, and "You cannot continue to operate as a Facebook service" is an empty threat the m…
How would this work in the case of data portability? If Facebook were to be forced to provide an API that allowed users to export all of their data to a competing social network would Facebook be responsible for ensuring that the competitor was using the data responsibly?
Putting control in the hands of the user is quite different from allowing third parties to exfiltrate data on a user without their consent.
(It is worth noting that this approach is still exploitable---third party convinces users to cough up their authentication codes, then acts as the user and makes the request for the whole kingdom themselves. But user education on the amount of power handed to someone when you literally give them your passwords is a separate issue).
At that time the Facebook's API was pretty much open and you can get everything. It was an experiment and Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of hope in what people could do with that data to add value to the users. I was not doubting that he was doing it with good intentions. But he was naive...
Unfortunately, most of the apps were abusing all the channels that Facebook was giving them to get more users and milk money out with ads and micro-payments (ex: through OfferPal Media - now Tapjoy).
During that time I was pretty surprised how much info people were giving away with a click through. Even on the main Facebook product people were posting all kind of stuff, including stupid things they were doing. It really seemed that people were becoming more open and it was the beginning of a new era for privacy (or lack thereof).
Facebook realized pretty quickly what apps were doing and they started adding more granular permissions. Eventually Facebook started limiting more and more access to the API until 2011/2012 when the user generating gold mine was pretty much gone. Again, Facebook has always been working to fix the experience for their users and also to make clear that those where 3rd party apps. But people did not really care.
There have been probably hundred of thousands of apps that had access to "sensitive" user data. According to the Facebook's Term of Service, data could not be stored for more than a certain amount of time. But nothing was technically preventing people to store that data forever...
And here we are...
Wait, how the heck did "At the Pool" get plaintext fb passwords?
Unfortunately, Facebook had a fundamental misunderstanding of how privacy has to work, and their users will be paying for their error for years. If it's earth-shatteringly bad for your users if their private data is leaked by a third-party, you cannot exfiltrate that data to a thrid-party. Full stop. No amount of policy un-leaks data, and "You cannot continue to operate as a Facebook service" is an empty threat the m…
Facebook used to be much better at locking down third-party exfiltration. But back in the early 2010s, the zeitgeist was against it; there were countless articles in the genre of "I'm a random third party developer, and Facebook is trying to stop me from exfiltrating massive dumps of my user's data! How anticompetitive!" So they decided to start being more open.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would this work in the case of data portability? If Facebook were to be forced to provide an API that allowed users to export all of their data to a competing social network would Facebook be responsible for ensuring that the competitor was using the data responsibly?
Not at all; they'd be responsible for bundling that data in a well-defined format into a blob of some kind that the user can request be exfiltrated (after providing their credentials to authenticate the request). The third-party would then have to digest said blob. Users assume trust of the third-party regarding responsibility for data misuse when they feed the third-party the blob (same as if they'd hand-entered the…
Wait, how the heck did "At the Pool" get plaintext fb passwords?
They did not. I think those are their own passwords if the user used directly the app without FB login
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would this work in the case of data portability? If Facebook were to be forced to provide an API that allowed users to export all of their data to a competing social network would Facebook be responsible for ensuring that the competitor was using the data responsibly?
Not at all; they'd be responsible for bundling that data in a well-defined format into a blob of some kind that the user can request be exfiltrated (after providing their credentials to authenticate the request). The third-party would then have to digest said blob. Users assume trust of the third-party regarding responsibility for data misuse when they feed the third-party the blob (same as if they'd hand-entered the…
So a Facebook user that is friends with you on Facebook says to Calendr, "scan my contacts and generate a calendar that already has my contacts' birthdays and any events they've created on it (one would assume this list would include anything that is shared at the Friends Only and Public tiers) for me."
Three weeks later, Calendr is hacked and all of their data is accessible. A Have I Been Pwned-style service will let you read through the data and sure enough: fixermark's super secret event was now publicly viewed as part of this data set. You do not have an account with Calendr and you haven't even heard of it before.
How would you, as a Facebook user, prevent this from happening beyond not creating the event in Facebook? How would Facebook prevent this beyond not providing the data to the third party?
[1] edit: oh geez, there is a Calendr. This has nothing to do with the real Calendr (this is fictitious Calendr).
Unfortunately, Facebook had a fundamental misunderstanding of how privacy has to work, and their users will be paying for their error for years. If it's earth-shatteringly bad for your users if their private data is leaked by a third-party, you cannot exfiltrate that data to a thrid-party. Full stop. No amount of policy un-leaks data, and "You cannot continue to operate as a Facebook service" is an empty threat the m…
In this case, the user clicked okay on a dialog that said something like "Share my friend list with this application." It would be sane at that point to expect that the application has access to your friend list. The application typically doesn't want to do a "computation", per se, they want to do something like show you your friends that are already using the application, so that you can share things with them and so on.
There are many, many services that share data in this way. iOS and Android share your contact list in a similar way, for example. And those services have the same exact problem, that sometimes third parties leak data. There is no other, better-implemented way for a platform to share data.
In the end, this is a "scandal" because Facebook is getting bad press already for other issues, and people do not really understand the nature of data platforms so they cannot distinguish big problems from small ones.
This other article that got posted today might explain why this happened in more detail: https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks-dirty-s... Seems to suggest that FB platform apis were designed to not share any privacy metadata with devs. Maybe not the same as how apps like At The Pool stored that data, but might explain the firehose of data that FB gave devs and now they will point the finger and say it…