Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

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> The Facebook Whitehat TOS explicitly forbid getting sensitive data that is not your own using an exploit.

This seems to be the crux of this whole thing. The article suggests that is not true, including some quotes from what I assume is "The Facebook Whitehat TOS" at [0] along with his interpretation of those quotes. As an unsophisticated person reading through that document, I don't see anything I would describe as "explicitly forbidding getting sensitive data that is not your own using an exploit". The closest seems to be: "make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations". I'm inclined to believe you and others in this thread that this was not the most responsibly done, but the seeming repeated claim that there is an explicit policy against this, which doesn't seem to be findable makes me scratch my head. Is there some other document, that is more explicit, or is this just supposed to be implicit knowledge, or what?

[0]: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat

The "privacy violations" statement is what I was talking about. I suppose you could make an argument that this is not sufficiently explicit for this scenario, but I believe it covers this ground. It is a privacy violation to retrieve sensitive data via an exploit.

It is worth pointing out that Wesley specifically avoiding dumping data from the S3 buckets which were directly related to User Data / Information. "There were quite a few S3 buckets dedicated to storing users' Instagram images, both pre and post processing. Since the Faceboook Whitehat rules state that researchers need to "make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations", I avoided downloading any content from those buckets" In fact, the only 'sensitive data' he retrieved in regards to user account information were the weak employee logins.

Is gathering up the credentials of employees not also a privacy violation? At this point you're going way beyond proving that you have access to something - you're actively trying to probe and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I don't (personally) believe that this is acceptable behaviour under a white hat program.

I see your point but I'm not sure if having passwords like 'changeme' qualifies as being a privacy violation... You should almost expect it to happen at that point.

But I do recognize that cracking passwords goes a step too far.

Fair enough, I can only say that it seems like they could be more explicit on that point, but I don't see anybody arguing against the idea that that their rules could use clarification.

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