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It also discloses whether someone is a customer or not. Possibly en masse. Problems: 1) Aids phishing attacks against Coinbase and customers 2) Oftentimes har
by wes-exp 13y ago
It also discloses whether someone is a customer or not. Possibly en masse. Problems:
1) Aids phishing attacks against Coinbase and customers
2) Oftentimes harmless tidbits of information can be combined to form non-harmless information. In this case, disclosing email, name, and the fact of being a Coinbase customer, or not, seems minor on its own. However, combine it with some other dataset (let's say emails/passwords taken from an unrelated site), and now it would be easier to break into accounts without setting off warning bells, since you already know who is a user or not.
Dismissing the information disclosure strikes me as akin to the "it's only harmless metadata" argument of the NSA. As we have already seen in many reports, "metadata" can be surprisingly powerful.
- SDGT 13y agoI would argue that using a personal email and filling in your full name on coinbase, who CLEARLY state you have no expectation of privacy in this regard, is effectively the same as publicizing the information. If one cares about the privacy aspect, then don't use an email that is tied back to you in any way, and certainly don't fill in your personal information.
- bronson 13y agoOr, and this is much easier, use a web site that actually cares about its users' privacy? If CoinBase is so needlessly sloppy then it's not hard to picture a Mt Goxish scenario in its future.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- billyhoffman 13y ago2 things: First, the vast majority of attackers are more "smash and grab" than "stealthy jewel theft." They really don't care about leaving tracks, they are going for volume. Want to phish people for coinbase creds? Email a mass of people. Have a list of usernames/password from a data breach? Attackers have automated tools that will automatically try them against thousands of websites. It's more expensive and time consuming for them to try and leverage minor info disclosures to narrow down their attack than to simply brute the crap out of everything. The economies of scale devalue the info discloure. Second, you are making an apples-to-oranges comparison. The boolean "Is/Is not a Coinbase user" provides a single data point, and is far less valuable than a hundreds if not thousands of datapoints about who is communicating with whom, and for how long. The single piece of meta-datUM of Coinbase pales in comparison to the meta-datA of phone logs.
- wes-exp 13y agoThe second point is a bit of a straw-man. I never meant to imply that this Coinbase disclosure and the NSA metadata are proportional in terms of severity; just that they are structurally similar. The point is that small bits of information can become surprisingly big with the right analysis and effort.
- wpietri 13y agoThat first point strikes me as irrelevant here. Smash and grab is what you do when your probability of success and/or your take size is small. But if you know somebody has a lot of money, then the rational amount of effort to apply goes way up. That's why stealthy jewel thieves are stealthy. Since the whole point of Coinbase is to contain money that, from other BTC sites, appears to be easily stolen and easily laundered, I think a set of known Coinbase accounts could well be worth the effort.
- danielweber 13y agoWhile I don't find Coinbase's response here reassuring, if you work with a business whose bizmodel is "people can send money to your email address" then it becomes essentially impossible to stop someone from verifying that your address exists.