Somehow I couldn't find one word I was looking for in this whole carefully-worded PR statement:
"Sorry".
The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
51–60 of 60 posts
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#52If you want your jaw to drop in regards to facebook disingenuousness regarding truth telling and the media, listen to the recent Lawfare podcast here:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-tech-ceos-head-h...
Go to 41:18 in and listen to the story regarding Facebook and NYU's AdObserver project.
Facebook has no credibility.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had this only a few weeks ago. Is that 'feature' removed now?
Oh, wow. I can confirm that said "feature" is still live. People's names and profile pictures show up after entering their email address in the login form shrug
I believe that was changed to only happen on a browser you've used that account with before. I haven't checked, so I could be wrong. Still not great if you login to your account on a public system.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#54I'm curious if the repeated negative press Facebook has received has impacted their hiring. Boots on ground perspectives appreciated, but I can share a data point of one: I'm a very average developer, and I get at least quarterly reach outs from Facebook-- a higher frequency than I've ever heard from any FANG (or any company in general). I used to get ads on the platform for FB Engineering jobs. After I deleted the a…
n=1, but a friend had offers from Google and Facebook, and went to Google largely because it wasn't Facebook . In my highly educated circles, McKinsey is held in higher esteem than Facebook. Thinking about that now, a few years of selecting for people who "disagree with the media" and are content with burning down society for a quick buck would really explain a lot. If you work at Facebook and you feel compelled to t…
Given that exact same choice, if I was looking for a job, I would unashamedly and gladly take Facebook over Google.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#55I remember the pop ups to please add your phone number, you know, just for security! They promise to never show this to anyone... and then this happens.
It’s like a comedy.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#56The attitude that this company (and many others) has towards the data they collect from billions of people is stunning. They claim that there was nothing they could do, even when one of their tools was misused to gather phone numbers. They don't take accountability for the fact that this likely already has and will continue to enable spammers and scammers to much more easily target their users. They refuse to send ou…
I can only speculate but what I think we are seeing here is a statement made in earnest by a corporate communication team, crafted with significant input from a product team. To admit that this was an intrusion would be severely career limiting. So they explain it in a hand-wavy fashion, enough to get the Comms people off their back. The end result is this unsatisfying explanation. Just speculation. There has to be a…
Same for the 'Sorry' word that is missing as I commented as well.
Any admission by Facebook can and will act against them in the [highly likely] class action that will be executed.
I'm sure their legal department checked every letter in this statement with a x100 magnifier.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#57I'm curious if the repeated negative press Facebook has received has impacted their hiring. Boots on ground perspectives appreciated, but I can share a data point of one: I'm a very average developer, and I get at least quarterly reach outs from Facebook-- a higher frequency than I've ever heard from any FANG (or any company in general). I used to get ads on the platform for FB Engineering jobs. After I deleted the a…
I know a guy who joined FB as a software dev manager a few years ago and left in less than a year. (Maybe after just six months.) He is definitely pretty critical and sometimes hints at how the internal culture is problematic and causing some of the issues visible from the outside. (He doesn't tell too much, though, for obvious reasons.)
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#58> The information did not include financial information, health information or passwords. Cool, should we assume everything else Facebook has was included?
And what sort of health and financial information does Facebook have?
They are profiling like crazy. I'm pretty sure they have at least an estimated income attached to almost every single of us. Also, they do have credit card numbers for those who buy ads.
But it may have just been a generic statement.
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#59Facebook is using doublespeak here. > It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019. .. a couple paragraphs later :: > We believe the data in question was scraped from people’s Facebook profiles by malicious actors using our contact importer prior to September 2019. Gee, that sounds a lot like someone…
> Gee, that sounds a lot like someone abused your contact importer tool to do something you didn't intend for it to do. From the article it appears that the contact importer is an API endpoint which returns a set of Facebook profiles given a set of phone numbers. In that sense, it did exactly what the developer intended. If I write a script to query google.com and get a response back you could say I'm not using googl…
It's almost what they intended. It was an internal API that they never thought would be exploited. (I.e. used by third parties.) Calling it scraping is a pretty fat lie.
I've just checked. My phone number is in the data set. I've never set my phone number public so no one should have been able to 'scrape' it.
On a side note, I remember learning about this feature, or maybe an earlier incarnation, a few years ago when a friend showed the the profile of a girl he just met at a bar. The girl had a pretty common name so I asked my friend how he looked her up, did they have friends in common. I was really just curious how FB would now which person to show. He said "no, she gave me her number and you can look them up like so and so". (I can't remember whether you could search for the number or had to create a contact, but it's besides the point.)
I was pretty baffled because it was obvious that you could just create a very powerful white pages type of db pretty easily. Which someone apparently did for half a billion people.
This also explains how someone managed to call me from a UK number a few weeks ago trying to sell me some news paper subscription. They said they were from the "Herald digest". And they did know my name (so it wasn't just dialling random numbers.)
Re: The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data
#60Don't really want to defend Facebook, but the amount of cynicism and bad faith here is too much. This article should be welcome, it gives us more information on what happened. It clarifies that this was not some sort of database leak (which is much more damaging), but a API abuse that allowed bad actors to figure out people's phone numbers. Overall article brings transparency to the situation, which is good.
I would have preferred if this were a database leak. At least that would have shown some effort towards protecting user data. The fact that it was acquired through a public-facing API makes it much worse, in my opinion, as it shows Facebook isn’t that concerned about protecting sensitive data.