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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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by mnm1 »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #42
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…

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.

Except the quote is generally wrong when it comes to issues of profit. It's simply backwards. People are fucking evil when it comes to money, profits, power, status, pleasure, and generally getting ahead of others. Considering those are the main motivators for almost all human actions, Hanlon's razor is clearly a bunch of bullshit that people spread around to end actual debate and discussions they don't like.

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

#83

Post by killyp »

athenot wrote: post #33
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.

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.

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

#84

Post by fullshark »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #55

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/key-statistics?p=FB $55 Billion in revenue and EBITDA 29.23B and they get a $5 Billion fine for doing a lot of scummy, but profitable stuff. The best part for FB? Two years from now FB will say to FTC, "you already fined us once...the largest fine ever blah blah blah"

How is that good? Next time they will fine them more.

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

#85

Post by whateveracct »

wnevets wrote: post #38
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…

> 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] in logs.

even worse

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

#86

Post by TallGuyShort »

wnevets wrote: post #38
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…

> 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] in logs.

That's still a pretty elementary error for a company that gets off on using CS-y riddles in interviews like Google used to. Move fast and break things, and then get a $5B fine.

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

#87

Post by nkozyra »

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #67
munk-a wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a small business - I get it, it's good to whitelist whatever information you're logging explicitly, but for smaller teams a hard to diagnose issue might lead the team to "log everything so we can sort it out later". Facebook is Facebook, whether this decision was the product of the corporation as a whole, a small dev team, or a highly paid consultant/third party, Facebook is a big enough company that they d…

Seems like a pretty trivial automated test for so many PHD's to miss: create_user('Bob', 'BobPassword123') assert "BobPassword123" not in logfile

Ah yes, the single, non-distributed, file-backed log Facebook uses.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

beat wrote: post #75
munk-a wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a small business - I get it, it's good to whitelist whatever information you're logging explicitly, but for smaller teams a hard to diagnose issue might lead the team to "log everything so we can sort it out later". Facebook is Facebook, whether this decision was the product of the corporation as a whole, a small dev team, or a highly paid consultant/third party, Facebook is a big enough company that they d…

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…

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