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Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigation in N.Y.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jakelazaroff 8y agoI'm glad the attorney general is getting involved. We need to start charging Facebook execs for these flagrant privacy violations. They're being fined 3 billion dollars for legal expenses relating to an FTC inquiry… and their stock price went up by 8% [1]. The market just does not care; it's time regulators and law enforcement started to. [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/facebook-stock-is-up-because-its-earnings-report-was-mostly-positive-51556138491 https://www.barrons.com/articles/facebook-stock-is-up-becaus...
- jonahb 8y agoThe market cares. It had already priced in a fine, possibly one larger than 3B. The reduction in uncertainty -- knowing the magnitude of the fine -- also positively affects the stock price. If the fine were cancelled tomorrow, you can be sure that, all else equal, Facebook's market cap would jump by 3B. The fines need to be bigger.
- baroffoos 8y agoThey need to increase the fine substantially for each repeated violation. After a few violations its going to be hard to justify a $50B fine to investors.
- kerng 8y agoTotally agree, at the third time there is really no excuse anymore to not bump this up to maybe even threaten the existence of an organization or it changes its behavior. For FB this is the nth time. I don't even know what n is anymore.
- acct1771 8y agoNeither do any of the regulators...
- rhizome 8y agoNo, they need to adjust the first-time penalties for deterrence. $50B at a minimum, because it has to hurt their stock price when they do these things. Or hey, how about a year of revenue.
- omeid2 8y agoThe fines also needs to be fair, not fixed cost. I think the EU has got the percentage-of-revenue approach right. A million dollar fine for a small company can be death-sentence while for a big player it is lose change, that is not fair.
- cobbzilla 8y agoI agree that percent of revenue is a much better metric to base these kinds of fines off of, but not without reservations -- a small company with high sales revenue but razor thin margin could get killed by a % revenue fine; this seems unfair to the little guy. On the other hand, if the fine is % income or anything but % gross receipts, then of course the system will be gamed endlessly by accountants and lawyers to show the smallest possible net number. The end result might be worse than a fixed fine. So % of revenue it is.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago> So % of revenue it is. GDPR, 4% of Global revenue and your Directors can be barred from operating in the EU.
- chongli 8y agoYes. The fine needs to take into account how much Facebook would stand to lose if the case went to trial and they were found guilty, setting a precedent for future actions against them. That seems like it could result in near-unlimited liability for Facebook. The fine for avoiding an admission of wrongdoing should be set equal to the expected value of all that liability, based on an estimate of the probability of winning the case.
- throwaway5167 8y agoThere's no way the government has the same resources as Facebook to make that case. The FTC loses when it goes to Court. Facebook would have more lawyers on the case than the FTC has paralegals total.
- chopin 8y agoAnd that guarantees victory? Interesting judicial system you have, over there.
- luckylion 8y agoWhere is that fundamentally different in other countries for very large (especially domestic) players? Will Germany actually take a swing at Volkswagen? Will Germany try to go after those that defrauded the government with cum-ex-trades? Everybody vs banks regarding the Libor scandal? Sure, they paid some fines, but the fines were far below the damage done, and it appears to still have been a good investment for the banks, that is: all in all they made money, fines included. Crime does pay at that level. That's not something US specific, I believe.
- chopin 8y agoI was referring to the fact that you can outpay your opponent. Yes, large corporations can get away with much more in other countries as well, but rarely by outpaying their opponents.
- Simple_Guy 8y agoThe fines should be 100 billion. Make them itch a little.
- SheinhardtWigCo 8y agoNot just execs, I hope. The engineers who wrote the code and managers who told them to do it should also face justice.
- droithomme 8y agoI agree, but with conditions. PEs have ethical responsibilities. If the engineers are licensed, yup, they absolutely have a moral and legal responsibility to refuse to sign off on illegal work. In most states though, software engineers are not professionally licensed, certified, or ethically trained. Often they are referred to using demeaning terms such as "coders", which are equated as "bricklayers" by thought leaders such as Steve McConnell and others. Thus it would not necessarily be reasonable to hold them to a responsibility refuse to follow illegal orders they were given as mindless "bricklayers" and "coders" etc, which is the most common paradigm of software engineers. Unintelligent implementors who are simply typing things up on command with a surfeit of semicolons can not be held to any sort of professional responsibility. But PEs absolutely can and must.
- baroffoos 8y agoThat would require all developers to become lawyers so they can make sure everything they are being asked to do is legal.
- spaceheretostay 8y agoWe don't all need to be lawyers to understand the basics of our laws. Knowledge of the existence of the law is assumed for all citizens. Ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse when the law is broken. (Yes, the US does have some new problems with private laws being passed, where the public is not allowed to know the law itself - and this opens up huge scary things. But that is not what is being discussed here and I don't believe is relevant.)
- wavefunction 8y agoWhat's wrong with introspection about what you're doing on an ethical level? There's no legal standard involved so you don't have to be a lawyer, just a bit more thoughtful.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoWhat laws have they broken? Without laws to break there isn't much justification for punishment.
- spaceheretostay 8y agoFacebook have broken a huge list of laws. But recently from my reading I think the current issue is a breach of contract. They signed a legal contract with the FTC and then broke it, hence the fine. There doesn't seem to be any debate that Facebook broke the law - just debate about what the punishments should be.
- kerng 8y agoTheft of personal information seems the most obvious one that they could be charged with. Unauthorized access of email accounts and exfiltration of information is something hackers have gone to jail for.
- joering2 8y agoSingle instance can put you 20 behind bars. Zuck would be computed 250,000 years for all the mass email access hack even if it cleverly asked users to actually gave passwords in at their own free will. But to semiquote: you kill one men thats a murder, you kill million men thats statistics.
- doodliego 8y agoThe Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, or in excess of authorization.
- orijing 8y agoIs it a coincidence that the stock price would move on the day when FB releases earnings?
- Causality1 8y agoPersonally I think monetary fines are a fundamentally flawed form of punishment. Send. Decisionmakers. To. Prison. I don't care if it's for just a single day but march them into a courthouse in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs.
- spinningslate 8y agoThis. Whether jail or some other sanction, hold decision makers personally accountable. Fines have their place, but - at least for a firm of FB's size - they just get priced into accounts. The FB/Zuckerberg combination is almost unique in terms of (1) market cap, (2) the controlling ownership he holds, and (3) behaviour of the firm. Facebook is reputedly pedalling furiously behind the scenes to prevent Zuckerberg himself being charged. Whilst saying almost nothing about the fines. That says everything about where they see the real danger.
- marcosdumay 8y agoDid they commit any crime? I do agree that fines are overused, but I don't think there's reason for sending anybody to prison on this case.
- Causality1 8y agoWhy is Facebook anticipating a five billion dollar fine if they didn't break any laws?
- marcosdumay 8y agoBreaking laws is not the same as comiting crimes.
- hjk05 8y agoNo matter how the market reacts 3 billions is still 3 billion. People need to stop trying to look for justice in the market trends, investors are not pricing facebook based on how much cash they have in the vault right this instance, and if a verdict comes in below expectations the price is bound to rise. Could you imagine the absurdity of them passing down a verdict of “and they shall be fined a billion per month until their stock price falls by at least 10%!”
- colpabar 8y agoI think the point is that we need to punish companies like Facebook in ways that might actually incentivize them to behave differently. If they get slapped with a fine that they can easily pay and then see their stock price go up, what's the point?
- save_ferris 8y agoThe purpose of the fine is to discourage FB from engaging in illegal and unethical behavior. The problem here is that FB sees a $3B fine as the cost of doing business, since they surely made much, much more than $3B engaging in these invasive, user-hostile tactics. If they know that regulators will only come after them for an arbitrarily low percentage of revenue generated from these activities, why would they stop doing them? If a punishment no longer deters bad behavior, then it's no longer a punishment.
- mehrdadn 8y agoDid anything happen regarding LinkedIn's email harvesting from before when Microsoft bought it? I feel like that was far worse than Facebook's.
- kerng 8y agoThey settled a class action lawsuite I think, but if I remember there was some form of consent involved that emails will be leveraged (probably not obvious either, and shouldn't be done). In Facebook's case it has clearly been misleading, possibly intentionally multiple times now (email, phone numbers,...).
- zamalek 8y agoI didn't like it (which is why they didn't get my damned password), but they were pretty open about what they planned to do with your credentials. The problem isn't how open they are, it's that most people don't understand what the harvesting means. Facebook could have asked for the sacrifice of the firstborn and people would have snapped it up on the prospect of a few likes on their fake online alterego. It's human nature and the HN echo chamber exists far outside that normalcy. Most people don't "get it" (through no fault of their own) and that's why it's dangerous [edit] and effective.
- simion314 8y ago>I didn't like it (which is why they didn't get my damned password), but they were pretty open about what they planned to do with your credentials. From what I read FB had a "bug" where the feature was not removed properly, so the text about harvesting was removed but by "mistake" the harvesting code was left running.
- pluma 8y agoI think what happened was that they had an "import friends from your email contacts" feature in the past and the code was reused for "verify your identity via email" but they didn't realise the code would still also upload the email contacts. At least that's the story I've heard about why this was an "honest mistake".
- sidcool 8y agoThis is probably the third investigation against FB this week. How do we still continue trusting it with our personal data? I have been equally stupid in sharing freely on FB/Instagram, not anymore.
- jbharter 8y agoAfter years of less frequent use, I finally quit after the 2016 election. I'm so much better off without it, you can do it too!
- Funes- 8y agoWhat about WhatsApp? Virtually no one in my country--not even the elderly, who now broadly use the app as well--is willing to abandon it, no matter how its parent company is depicted. In fact, last time I checked, around 75% of all population use the app. I don't, and thus I'm paying the price socially--mentally, I'm better off; it comes without saying.
- midasz 8y agoSame - I don't really speak to some people anymore because I moved away from WhatsApp. The one's I do really want to speak to (family) have installed both apps now, simply because I messaged the group saying "I'll be moving away from WhatsApp - you can reach me through text, calling, and telegram" and just left/uninstalled WhatsApp. It can be that simple.
- droithomme 8y agoSo this relates to their practice of ransacking all your email contacts without your consent, engaging in data theft as they upload them and analyze them for subsequent actions. And of course Linked In is also notorious for engaging in this criminal vile privacy raping practice. I remember maybe 8 years ago it was here on HN that a company was found to be doing this and it was shocking to some. But an executive of that company showed up here and said that "everybody does it" and it's "standard practice" and for some years after that anyone complaining about the practice here was not only downvoted but sometimes warned by our glorious compromised moderators. In my opinion the practice of contact list ransacking should never be allowed, is clearly unethical, and anyone defending it is an enemy of humanity who should be locked away in order to protect society.
- misiti3780 8y agoyou were probably thinking about when Path got caught doing it .
- judge2020 8y agoDiscussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632934
- jmspring 8y agoLinkedIn is notorious for this. The app still asks for contact access all the time.
- rags2riches 8y agoSaying that the app asks is not accurate. It's not presented as a choice and it's not clear what will happen when you continue.
- helloindia 8y agoThe worst is, even if you deny Linkedin access to your contacts. Your contacts will still show up in suggestions, because others have givein LinkedIn access to their contacts. And LinkedIn maps it with your Linkedin signup email address.
- yeah1234 8y agoWith all these high profile big dollar lawsuits it’s almost as if New York is grasping at straws to find funding.
- garbonicc 8y agojust.stop.using.facebook
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- garbonicc 8y agowhat are you some kind of fascist
- dang 8y agoOk, since you don't seem to want to use this site as intended, I've banned the account. If that changes, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban anyone who gives us reason to believe they'll follow the site guidelines in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- product50 8y agoThis might have been an honest mistake. To do this for 1.5M users only when Facebook's user-base runs into billions might indicate that.
- shard972 8y agoHow do you make a form to ask for people's email password by mistake?
- OrgNet 8y agoYou had to give them your email password when you signed up...
- jimsmart 8y ago> To do this for 1.5M users only when Facebook's user-base runs into billions Well, put like that, it sounds just like they did it as a planned A/B test strategy (like they do to trial other features) — and, personally, I believe this to be the case. Deploying such code/functionality is hardly an accident/bug.
- busymom0 8y agoAre there screenshots or something of this "asking for email password" thing the article talks about? I feel like anyone who sees a facebook page asking for their email password should already feel a bit warned and skeptical. I had personally never seen such a thing until 3 years ago when I deactivated my account. Is this a new thing?
- orijing 8y agoThe Business Insider article has this: https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5ca400acc6cc5023740b5924-1920-1014.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5ca400acc6cc5023740b5... https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-million-users-email-contacts-without-permission-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-millio...
- shumailakhan 8y agoNyccc http://licensekeys.co/iobit-driver-booster-pro-crack/ http://licensekeys.co/iobit-driver-booster-pro-crack/
- orijing 8y agoThe article claims the practice "was uncovered by Business Insider last week", implying FB was being sneaky about it. But if you look at the Business Insider article (https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-million-users-email-contacts-without-permission-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-millio...), you'll see this: > A Facebook spokesperson said before May 2016, it offered an option to verify a user's account using their email password and voluntarily upload their contacts at the same time. However, they said, the company changed the feature, and the text informing users that their contacts would be uploaded was deleted — but the underlying functionality was not. > "Last month we stopped offering email password verification as an option for people verifying their account when signing up for Facebook for the first time. When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account" so Facebook discovered this bug in an audit of its code, fixed it, and planned to notify everyone who was impacted.
- kerng 8y agoCan we please stop calling these privacy violations bugs? It sounds like a benign thing. These are not bugs anymore. It's unauthorized access to records of millions, and Facebook is the one who performed the violation. I can give a dog walker or cleaning personel the keys to my apartment, still if they steal stuff and I have evidence they will be prosecuted. It's not a bug that they don't have business ethics.
- product50 8y agoSo a hacker took all of Equifax's data including your SSNs, address, names, DOB etc. By your analogy, all of Equifax engineers should be in jail right now! BTW, just in case you are unaware, Equifax got away with this hack with zero fines in US.
- kerng 8y agoYour are mixing things up.... In this situation the hacker is Facebook. Most of the other Facebook data breaches where they didn't secure data accordingly would compare more to what you refer to. This case is different though as Facebook performed unauthorized actions on email accounts, basically breaking in.
- cronix 8y agoThis could be fixed fairly easily. "Hey Russia, if you're listening, it sure would be nice to dox Mark Zuckerberg and all of his contacts." FB would think a bit differently about privacy. Dumb *ucks.
- dschuetz 8y agoWhy is "we will never ask for your passwords at any time" not a thing anymore? What Facebook did was phishing, basically. With the password Facebook could be doing a lot more rather than just "upload contacts". Imagine those passwords landing (or accidentally leaking) into the hands of third-party services Facebook is working with! On the user end, what happened to "never ever give away your passwords"? I mean, that's why spear-phishing is so successful, because naïve people give away their passwords in the hopes that this darn annoying login-screen goes away.
- javagram 8y agoAsking for passwords has been an industry standard for a decade or more. Bad security practice? Yes IMO but companies have been getting away with it. Besides Facebook I can think of LinkedIn and Mint as two big examples of SaaS that ask for 3rd party passwords. Mint is even getting your banking information, whereas LinkedIn and Facebook were just doing contact import. And of course before the era of SaaS giving applications passwords was normal, e.g. putting your email passwords into an email client like Eudora or Thunderbird. It only really becomes questionable in SaaS where the passwords inevitably end up on a server somewhere subject to a data breach, or, in Facebook’s case, misuse by another piece of its own software.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoPlease investigate 'everyone' for this.
- happppy 8y agoFacebook stock is going up regardless of so many scandals.
- rasz 8y agouh oh an investigation! as meaningful as the Charter Spectrum one I imagine. https://eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2019/04/19/what-means-consumer-charter-spectrum-new-york-reach-deal/3523198002/ https://eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/alba... TLDR Scammed consumers twice, gets to keep doing what it was doing. "Charter and the Department believe that this action is an important step forward" indeed