4 ms·

This may be an unpopular opinion, but things like this happen. Someone gets the task to implement a login and either doesn't realize they should be using OAuth

This may be an unpopular opinion, but things like this happen. Someone gets the task to implement a login and either doesn't realize they should be using OAuth or is simply too lazy to do so. Next, someone has the idea to suggest friends, so let's grab some email contacts for that purpose. That stuff happens all the time at small companies. While it's certainly bad practice, it's often not evil intent, but just lack of technical skills (for the former issue) and missing sense for potential privacy issues (for the latter). In case of a large company like Facebook, one could expect they'd have processes and education in place to prevent such incidents, but I guess this happened a while back when FB was much smaller than it is now.

ascendantlogic 8y ago
> This may be an unpopular opinion, but things like this happen. Yes, and at Facebook in the context of data gathering they seem to happen ALL THE TIME. So if they did actually care about privacy they'd make changes to curb these sort of "mistakes", but taken in aggregate the relentless "bugs" show a pattern of willful malevolence.
flokie 8y ago
"Next, someone has the idea to suggest friends, so let's grab some email contacts for that purpose." You're joking right?
ajuc 8y ago
They broke the law. They should pay. "Accidentally" is irrelevant here, even if you believe them.
Balgair 8y ago
I'd buy that excuse back in 2008. But it's been over a decade of these types of reports about FB and their behavior. FB should be asymptoting towards good ethical standards and software practices. These reports should be getting more and more rare. Instead, they seem to be growing exponentially away from good ethics and practices [0]. It feels like it's getting worse, faster, not less worse and slower. Here's a partial list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook [0] Yes, I'm being a bit hyperbolic with the graph analogies.

ascendantlogic 8y ago

> This may be an unpopular opinion, but things like this happen. Yes, and at Facebook in the context of data gathering they seem to happen ALL THE TIME. So if they did actually care about privacy they'd make changes to curb these sort of "mistakes", but taken in aggregate the relentless "bugs" show a pattern of willful malevolence.

flokie 8y ago

"Next, someone has the idea to suggest friends, so let's grab some email contacts for that purpose." You're joking right?

ajuc 8y ago

They broke the law. They should pay. "Accidentally" is irrelevant here, even if you believe them.

Balgair 8y ago

I'd buy that excuse back in 2008. But it's been over a decade of these types of reports about FB and their behavior. FB should be asymptoting towards good ethical standards and software practices. These reports should be getting more and more rare. Instead, they seem to be growing exponentially away from good ethics and practices [0]. It feels like it's getting worse, faster, not less worse and slower. Here's a partial list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook [0] Yes, I'm being a bit hyperbolic with the graph analogies.