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Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data
- jsnell 7y agoThe Facebook blog post would probably be a better source, since it explains the nature of the data: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/05/changes-groups-api-access/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/05/changes... I.e. apps added to a group by an admin could get some metadata about members of the group. (That blog post would also have been harder to mis-interpret than the NBC article. Half the early comments seem to think that this was about Facebook engineers improperly accessing data.)
- jonny_eh 7y agoIn the context of a Facebook user, what is the difference between data and metadata?
- jsnell 7y agoI guess it depends on whether you view this as a continuum or have an absolute "anything the user touched is user data" take. Compare it to a couple of security issues they had last year: First, the one where the attackers would have had full access to the accounts. Photos, posts, private messages, likes, contacts, etc: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/ Or the one where some apps could read photos that they were not given access to, or in some cases that the user hadn't shared at all: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/12/14/notifying-our-developer-ecosystem-about-a-photo-api-bug/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/12/14/notifyi...
- dang 7y agoIf we do that, people will say that we're trying to protect FB by replacing a news article with a corporate press release. Is there a better third-party article?
- knzhou 7y agoObviously there isn't! I don't know what goes into running this site, but personally, if I know I'm guaranteed to get a totally one-sided take, I'd rather have the one from the people who actually know how to code.
- randomb_1979 7y ago>>I don't know what goes into running this site, but personally, if I know I'm guaranteed to get a totally one-sided take, I'd rather have the one from the people who actually know how to code. In other words, if you don't know how to code, you are probably not intelligent enough to write about a technical topic?
- knzhou 7y agoNo, there are intelligent people everywhere. But intelligent people are often catastrophically wrong when writing on a topic about which they know nothing.
- randomb_1979 7y agoThe key word, of course, is "often" and not "always". How would you know the difference?
- pellucidar 7y agoIt’s not about knowing the difference; it’s about recognizing the pattern and applying the appropriate measure of skepticism. It happens with complicated topics in other fields as well.
- fit2rule 7y agoPeople who think they always know best are often catastrophically wrong when it comes to writing about the topic they think they know better than anyone else. At some point, you've got to let people decide for themselves what is true. A single source of information is an unreliable source.
- dbbk 7y agoI'm confused as to how this is 'improper', if Facebook made this data available why are the developers at fault?
- ben_jones 7y ago> “Although we’ve seen no evidence of abuse, we will ask them to delete any member data they may have retained and we will conduct audits to confirm that it has been deleted,” the company said in the blog post. I wonder how these "audits" are done? Force the individuals into a legal agreement through threat of a larger action?
- dboreham 7y agoThe audits are a figment of a lawyer's imagination. Edit: when I wrote this I assumed "developers" meant employees of Facebook who work as developers. Actually they're referring not to "developers" but 3rd parties to whom they issued access tokens. My comment is still valid..
- jdoliner 7y agoThey make them pinky promise. (Can't break a pinky promise.)
- r721 7y agoCould this be related to upcoming release of internal documents? >Big new leak of internal Facebook docs to be published Thursday. There’s been extraordinary attempts by Facebook to suppress this including seeking disclosure of emails sent to journalists & MPs https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1191402411622928384 https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/119140241162292838... >At noon on Wednesday, Dublin time, I + others will publish full copies of 6,971 pages of Facebook confidential and legal documents, leaked in February. https://twitter.com/dcampbell_iptv/status/1191397958589259776 https://twitter.com/dcampbell_iptv/status/119139795858925977...
- claudeganon 7y agoHadn’t heard about this. Certainly casts their recent cozying up to the Republican establishment in a new light (i.e. avoiding further enforcement actions).
- r721 7y agoDuncan Campbell (@dcampbell_iptv) started posting links to documents: https://twitter.com/dcampbell_iptv https://twitter.com/dcampbell_iptv UPD Reuters story: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebook-executives-planned-switcharoo-on-data-policy-change-court-filings-idUSKBN1XG1QP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebo... Computer Weekly story: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252473540/Lawmakers-study-leaked-Facebook-documents-made-public-today https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252473540/Lawmakers-stud...
- rdxm 7y agoI'm shocked, shocked to find out there's gambling going on in this establishment....
- cityzen 7y agoTotally off topic but I’d love to hear what Mark tells the barber when asked how he likes his hair.
- gorgoiler 7y agoThe hairstyle is called a “Caesar”.
- kick 7y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-b... "My wife was making fun of me, saying she thought there were three people on the honeymoon: me, her, and Augustus," Zuckerberg told the New Yorker. "All the photos were different sculptures of Augustus." On his fascination with Augustus, Zuckerberg said, "Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace. What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today. Two hundred years feels unattainable."
- isoskeles 7y agoI wonder how many people think like this. Obviously the Roman Empire did not constitute the entire planet, so the claim that world peace was achieved should be provably false.
- Joof 7y agoI may have heard of such a thing happening at another company. Certain personalities just can't seem to help themselves.
- matheusmoreira 7y agoIntelligence agency employees engage in LOVEINT.
- r1nkgrl 7y agoThis is referring to 100 external software developers that use Facebook's APIs, not Facebook engineers as I initially assumed reading the title. Source: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/05/changes-groups-api-access/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/05/changes...
- desdiv 7y agoTo clarify further, the exact phrasing used was "roughly 100 partners", as in roughly 100 external legal entities. Each legal entity could have any number of software developers.
- dang 7y agoOk, we've put partners in the title above.
- buboard 7y agoI use the facebook API but don't consider myself a facebook partner. I'm fine with "API user"
- lancewiggs 7y agoBut other partners may have hundreds of users.
- buboard 7y agoThey 're all using my key, i get the data and i m responsible for it, not the FB user.
- dang 7y agoOk, we've turned the partners into API users.
- octocode 7y agoMust've been the Gates of Galloo devs
- AlexandrB 7y agoHeadline 2 weeks from now: Facebook now says as many as 1000 developers may have accessed user data improperly
- sudenmorsian 7y agoDon’t worry, Facebook will use this as a learning opportunity going forwards. /s
- hanging 7y agoas many as 1000 developers may have accessed user data improperly ... using this one weird trick!
- designium 7y agoFor some reason, I don't think this is surprising. Within the tech industry, specially Hacker News readers, we know that Facebook does a lot of "growth hacks", "gorilla marketing", "Microsoft way of doing things - Bill's era (remember Netscape vs. IE?)". So, even if FB Internal docs are released, the real surprising fact will be that end users are not going to simply stop using FB, IG, WhatsApp and we get mystified about "WHY"?! Or just "accept" that's always the case. At the end, the users are either not interested to follow what FB does nor they have access to the truth. With those Billion of users, most of them are outside the sphere of influence of American media. Each country shows its most interesting news, a combination of top current world and local news. The current ones would be "Climate Change", "Hong Kong Protests", "Trade war US and China", "Something in the Middle East", "Something about US Stocks", and maybe: something about FB. If we imagine ourselves as news writers, it is not easy to convey the nuances, calculated moves, and strategic choices that FB is doing to control its market to the general population. Thus, there are many barriers to really use this information to change FB behavior. Perhaps I'm pessimistic about it. So at the end, it will only be surprising if the users understand and FB get huge pushback from its user base.
- jdkee 7y agoWe watched this documentary in the fake news class I taught this past summer. https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 While some of the assertions in the film are unsubstantiated, the resulting classroom discussion on the role of social media and privacy were immensely constructive.
- forgingahead 7y agoDid your class cover any aspect of how the mainstream media, like cable and broadcast TV news channels and the top printed newspapers in the country, also practice heavy bias in their reporting, and how the members of your class could become aware whenever those biases arose?
- jdkee 7y agoYes, we did. We cover the difference between journalism and its ethics for the social good and the media, which is produced for consumption.
- anongraddebt 7y agoA key problem is the dearth of actual journalism today. The Economist being one of the few exceptions, along with Reuters (not sure how to classify them though).
- chillacy 7y agoI was a bit underwhelmed, while some of the voter suppression stuff was pretty abhorrent, I thought building personality profiles and launching targeted ads was pretty mundane at the end of the day. The next level of discussion that interests me is why social media manipulation is so powerful in the first place. If people's beliefs are so heavily influenced by who we communicate with, what are the chances that we aren't under those same forces, and is there even an objective point of view in any of this?
- knzhou 7y ago
- theelous3 7y agoWhat a surprise.
- sdan 7y agoRegardless of how many developers have "improperly accessed user data", you can do a lot of stuff as a regular person such as tracking how long all your friends sleep: https://github.com/sqren/fb-sleep-stats https://github.com/sqren/fb-sleep-stats After I found one of my friends doing this, I quit FB (this reason among others).
- knzhou 7y agoYou could find much much more personal information about your friends before social media, the old fashioned way -- stalking. Both stalking and this kind of data scraping have the same response: get better friends.
- pengstrom 7y agoSitting in the comforts of your own home is very different from having to go outside to reach the victims.
- knzhou 7y agoAnd blocking social media stalkers is much much easier than stopping real ones. It is indeed a different game, but I don't think it's qualitatively worse.
- crematoria 7y agoIt can be automated and packaged into a solution for anyone to use. IRL stalking is hard and dangerous, and it's going to be that way for the foreseeable future. Is that "qualitatively" worse enough?
- knzhou 7y agoNo, because blocking people takes one click. You can completely solve the problem in literally two seconds. For that reason, I’m more confident of my privacy when on social media sites than in real life.
- tobr 7y agoRemember that Facebook PR has a habit of releasing a tiny number when they break bad news. The actual number has been as much as 100 times larger[1], but they get the smaller number into articles and the news cycle moves on. For some strange reason their initial wrong estimates are always in favor of Facebook. Based on that, this “one hundred” may well turn out to be “ten thousand”. 1: https://www.vox.com/2019/4/18/18485528/facebook-instagram-passwords-stored-unencrypted-security-issue https://www.vox.com/2019/4/18/18485528/facebook-instagram-pa...
- tobtoh 7y agoIf past admissions are any indication, expect a 'revised' admission in a few weeks where they 'discover' that the actual number is one thousand partners who have improperly accessed data.
- tannhaeuser 7y agoHow can it be that Facebook with all their engineering prowess can't even tell who accessed what, let alone put adequate permission controls on their APIs? Didn't they invent GraphQL and whatnot and aren't they bound to GDPR in EU requiring them to list specifically and individually the external partner companies they're sharing data with, and the kind of data shared?
- netsharc 7y agoProbably laziness. A few years ago (before GDPR) third party "apps" on FB could access many things, and FB just said "don't worry, the devs can't do anything bad because they had to click a button that said they'll follow our rules, or be banned!". So many of my friends used stupid quiz apps, certainly leaking my data to those 3rd parties too.
- speedplane 7y ago>> How can it be that Facebook with all their engineering prowess can't even tell who accessed what, let alone put adequate permission controls on their APIs? > Probably laziness Facebook is a lot of things, but they're not lazy. As far as can be seen, their decisions are largely intentional. If they didn't do something, it's because they didn't want to or it would hurt their bottom line, not cause they're lazy.
- newsbinator 7y ago100 is a number that raises my curiosity. Not 97 partners or 104 partners. Exactly 100.
- talonx 7y agoFB's post actually says "roughly 100 partners", not exactly 100.
- waheediqbal 7y agoSo many controversies with facebook lately. It seems like there is something wrong with facebook.
- throwawaymanbot 7y agoCan we throw Mark Zuckerberg in Jail yet?