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?

Comments

Re:Ensuring Their Safety

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"We're sorry we published your name, censoring duty and home address to the Goat Bladder Knitting and IED Club. Please click here to enroll in three free months of credit monitoring..."

How much will it take?

[Grishnakh]

How much will it take for people to finally get a clue about how bad Facebook is?

Re:How much will it take?

[Grishnakh]

Considering other corporations are even worse, what is the point of fighting back?

You don't need to "fight back", and other corporations are irrelevant. Facebook is a non-essential service which provides nothing of value. It's just like having a cable TV package, for example (or worse, a package with ESPN). The simple solution is to stop using it and do something better with your time.

Facebook is not an essential utility/service like your water/sewer service, electricity, or even internet service. It's no more useful or essential than playing Flappy Birds on your phone.

Re:Ensuring Their Safety

[Anonymous Coward]

We've also improved our privacy options. Uncheck here if you do not want terrorists to be unable to not view your personal details.

Strange Policy

[mfh]

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.

Re:Rats!

[computational super]

trying to one-up Uber

Modern western civilization has taught me that you can get away with absolutely anything as long as you make sure to keep appeasing feminists. Keep that one rule in mind, and you're teflon.

To be expected

[evolutionary]

This is what happens when a large amount of something valuable is available from one convenient location. when are people going to stop sending sensitive data to these guys. They send our data to various state police department (and probably federal+ groups as well) who are reportedly using that data for a face recognition system deemed illegal in two states (and the police don't seem to care the state laws make it's use illegal), marketing companies, and probably anyone who will pay Facebook enough. There is no real privacy on Facebook as it was never a priority. When are we all going to learn.