Facebook Exposes Employee Data To Terrorists (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian is reporting that Facebook accidentally exposed the personal information of the moderators that remove terrorist content to the groups that posted that very content. From the article it looks like 6 of them actually had their profiles viewed. From the article, "The security lapse affected more than 1,000 workers across 22 departments at Facebook who used the company's moderation software to review and remove inappropriate content from the platform, including sexual material, hate speech and terrorist propaganda."
What are Facebook's responsibilities here?
How much will it take for people to finally get a clue about how bad Facebook is?
We've also improved our privacy options. Uncheck here if you do not want terrorists to be unable to not view your personal details.
I find it utterly strange that the same profiles that a moderator would use in their official duties would be somehow linked to their own Facebook profile. That seems to me like a huge security oversight. Paid mods should ALWAYS have separate credentials from their own personal stuff. What happens when FB fires someone? They just change their FB acct to non-admin? Seems like a huge problem if there are any rollbacks.
No. You gotta keep shit separated. I get that most forums around typically associate user accts with privs... but that's bad policy if your system is going to be targeted. Better to have secret hidden mod accts that can be audited internally but do not show up externally... and can't be accessed remotely. Remote mod accts should have extra layers of auditing and security as well.
I'm probably preaching to the choir, but FB never seemed like a very talented company, or at best their amoral practices will always be to their disadvantage, as we see here.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.