Facebook and Its Executives Are Getting Destroyed After Botching the Handling of a Massive Data Breach (businessinsider.com)

The way Facebook has disclosed the abuse of its system by Cambridge Analytica, which has been reported this week, speaks volumes of Facebook's core beliefs. Sample this except from Business Insider: Facebook executives waded into a firestorm of criticism on Saturday, after news reports revealed that a data firm with ties to the Trump campaign harvested private information from millions of Facebook users. Several executives took to Twitter to insist that the data leak was not technically a "breach." But critics were outraged by the response and accused the company of playing semantics and missing the point. Washington Post reporter Hamza Shaban: Facebook insists that the Cambridge Analytica debacle wasn't a data breach, but a "violation" by a third party app that abused user data. This offloading of responsibility says a lot about Facebook's approach to our privacy. Observer reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the news about Cambridge Analytica: Yesterday Facebook threatened to sue us. Today we publish this. Meet the whistleblower blowing the lid off Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. [...] Facebook's chief strategy officer wading in. So, tell us @alexstamos (who expressed his displeasure with the use of "breach" in media reports) why didn't you inform users of this "non-breach" after The Guardian first reported the story in December 2015? Zeynep Tufekci: If your business is building a massive surveillance machinery, the data will eventually be used and misused. Hacked, breached, leaked, pilfered, conned, "targeted", "engaged", "profiled", sold.. There is no informed consent because it's not possible to reasonably inform or consent. [...] Facebook's defense that Cambridge Analytica harvesting of FB user data from millions is not technically a "breach" is a more profound and damning statement of what's wrong with Facebook's business model than a "breach." MIT Professor Dean Eckles: Definitely fascinating that Joseph Chancellor, who contributed to collection and contract-violating retention (?) of Facebook user data, now works for Facebook. Amir Efrati, a reporter at the Information: May seem like a small thing to non-reporters but Facebook loses credibility by issuing a Friday night press release to "front-run" publications that were set to publish negative articles about its platform. If you want us to become more suspicious, mission accomplished. Further reading: Facebook's latest privacy debacle stirs up more regulatory interest from lawmakers (TechCrunch).

Comments

A lesson

[burtosis]

For people who didn't see why they should care about who uses thier data or how it's used, thinking they had noting to hide and it wouldn't affect them, I hope you learned a lesson.

Re: A lesson

[jd]

What was lost by people accessing your private data in your account?

Every page you've ever visited, including any that could compromise you.

Every post you've ever written, even to closed and secret groups.

Every after you've chased. Every move you made. Every like you paid, every group you've saved, they've been watching you.

Oh, don't you see, you're in their data tree, every move you've made means that they get paid.

Enough of the hyperbole in the headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Slashdot, please knock it off with the hyperbole in the headline. Unless the Facebook executives are literally being torn limb from limb or being ground into dust, I don't really find the over top headline informative or useful.

Re:Harvesting profiles is not a breach

[Zocalo]

No, it's not a breach, Facebook is correct on that point. The real issue here, and one that Facebook seems to be pulling off successfully judging by some of the replies so far, is that Facebook's response to 50m user profiles being harvested and abused is to turn it into a discussion about semantics through misdirection. That's *exactly* what Facebook wants the discussion to be on, because it puts them in a favourable light, rather than the real point of TFS, which is that their business model is not only based almost entirely on sharing user data with third parties, but also has no controls or policies in place to effectively govern what happens when they get a bad actor like Cambridge Analytics in the mix.

tl;dr: it's not just about "All your data belong to Facebook (and the rest)", it's that they'll freely share that data with third parties and don't give a fuck what happens when someone abuses their access to it.

Anyone surprised by this?

[Locke2005]

The old rule still applies: don't post ANYTHING on the internet that you would be upset to seeing printed in the newspaper that next day! I'd advise against taking any digital nudes or videos in the first place; no telling where they will end up. Don't google anything that would trigger NSA keywords, no matter how interesting the subject of homemade explosives is. Avoid watching kitty porn. Don't mention online how much you would love to see Trump have a heart attack. Probably need to avoid monitored keywords in your phone conversations as well.