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Privacy group is preparing a case to the Irish courts over Facebook data leak
- cortesoft 6y agoI wonder if anyone ever sued the phone companies for printing phone books... they had the name and phone number for everyone!
- CrazyCatDog 6y agoI’m fairly confident that we could all request not to be listed. Perhaps a closer parallel is to ask if the phone directories could be sued for publishing a number following an opt-out request...
- RHSeeger 6y agoYou need to pay extra to not be listed.
- Daho0n 6y agoSome countries might allow this but not all. I can set my number as secret (not shown when calling someone and not included in any lists) at my telco userpage and I can (also for free) set everything, incl. name and my address as secret too on a national webportal. Doing so hides the info from domainname look up etc. and in most governmental systems as it is made to help protect privacy and stop sstalkers This is in Denmark btw.
- xico 6y agoOnly became free in 2003 in France, and the main telecom company then was not happy, refused to tell how much money it was gaining from selling the data previously, and asked for a subscription increase in exchange.
- cortesoft 6y agoWhen I was growing up, you had to pay the phone company to not list your number.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mhh__ 6y agoDid they have my phone number? Literally one click and I had a list of every UK Facebook users public phone number, that's not a phone book.
- cortesoft 6y agoLibraries had phone books for other areas. You could find the phone number for anyone. There as no easy way to do a reverse lookup, but I think people are more afraid of someone finding their number from their name, not their name from their number.
- CrazyCatDog 6y agoIronically, Ireland might be the most capable nation of reigning in big-tech given their preferred tax status and their subsequent mind-blowing profits residing there beyond the reach of the US feds—for now at least!
- de6u99er 6y agoWell deserved.
- akudha 6y agoIt depends on the outcome. Companies get sued, sue each other all the time. A company like FB probably has the best lawyers money can buy, it is probably just business as usual for them at this point. I do hope something good (for users, not FB) comes out of it.
- rmccue 6y agoIf anyone else is looking for the link to said action, it appears to be https://www.digitalrights.ie/facebook/ https://www.digitalrights.ie/facebook/
- nmeofthestate 6y agoFacebook is saying the info was scraped, but I don't see my phone number publicly visible anywhere on Facebook, yet it's found by HIBP - any idea what they're referring to?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lolinder 6y agoI believe the data was scraped from the API endpoint that allowed looking users up by their phone number--the bot just ran every possible phone number and got back everyone who had that feature enabled. They've locked that endpoint down, but this is the fallout from that initial failure to rate limit.
- jarenmf 6y agoOne must be really dumb to allow a bot to make hundreds of millions of API requests and not noticing.
- elwell 6y agoThat's not that many API requests at Facebook's scale. Would be curious as to the rate that the requests were made; as well as how many IPs they were distributed over.
- artificial 6y agoConsidering in 2017 they were serving up 1.2 trillion API requests a day it's a drop in the bucket. [0] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2017/04/18/graph-api-v2.9/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2017/04/18/graph-a...
- atat7024 6y agoThe Fappening was Find My iPhone API rate unlimited......
- dkersten 6y ago
- joe_the_user 6y agoAs I recall, the leak was essentially bots scraping data that FB calls "public" but which it's terms of use say not to scrape. The thing is, FB's protections are kind a fantasy to start with. The idea you know your friend's information but your friend's-friend's-friend's might work in real life but not on the Internet. At the same time, this fantasy is what Facebook has sold it's users (and I'd note that a look of FB user got online first with FB and so take their real life beliefs to it). One outcome of the suit might be for FB to say "you couldn't expect real privacy from this anyway, how can we be liable" and then the judge force to FB to label it's policy "privacy protection entertainment" in the way we got World Wrestling Entertainment. And another option is for FB to pay off the suit just to avoid that happening. -- I remember FB saying "this wasn't a hack", which is technically true. It's a manifestation of the porousness of FB's model, which is worse, at least if you expect privacy from FB. -- Finally, lots of people say "I hate FB for not giving us privacy" where they mean the sort of pseudo-privacy around "only friends know". Here, if you accept this concept of privacy, only an entity like FB could give it to you, so cleaving to that privacy policy strengthens FB even when it's hated. It's the regulating social networks. If FB was a regulated monopoly, they'd be absolutely "too big to fail".
- pmarreck 6y agoServes 'em right for building in PHP ;)
- merlinsky 6y agoThey can get hit with almost any lawsuit, and get out completely unscathed. These big tech companies (Facebook, Google, Apple, etc.) are at the point that they are - too big for our planet. It is really - simple as that.