Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of Facebook sympathizers here. Is this what devs do at Facebook? Browse HN and defend the reputation of Facebook at any cost? Yes we all knew what we were in for when we signed up for Facebook and Instagram. Yes, they can sell our data to show us ads about what coals to buy for July 4th bbq party and we are OK with that. But not to turn blind eye to foreign entities which in return use it against us and jeopardize the American democracy and social fabric.

View on HN

lol, noticed the same thing. Sadly its not just Facebook doing it. Every time a company goes under fire there's a ton of comments defending them or saying how it's a necessary step etc. etc. Sometimes its the "famous" users here doing this, consistently for the same companies. Gonna guess they have invested in them but this kind of shilling is just stupid.

TBH I see a plenty of the arguments on the other side too, whenever a company does something people disagree with, there are calls for regulation. Even further, there are lots of people here who get annoyed when they see someone just skirting the rules without literally breaking them and always argue for the most expansive interpretation.

I think some people just naturally like rules and would prefer to live in a more orderly, rule based society, and some people don't like the idea of being constrained. Both groups act quite sanctimoniously though, as if their personal preference is somehow the holy truth.

I don't work for facebook. I don't have a facebook. I don't like facebook.

What I do like is honesty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_breach

Look at this very robust list of data breaches and tell me how the CA/Facebook incident this week looks anything like any of them.

2006 - AOL search data scandal [1]

>The release was intentional and intended for research purposes;

Sounds pretty damn close to this event with Facebook

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

An analogous example would be if the CA/FB breach had access to private facebook messages or information that was never intended for public consumption.

In the CA/FB case the information was either public (and could be scraped as such) or was collected in the form of facebook apps.

This is not true. The old Facebook API gave access to all data the user had access to. This included information (posts, photos…) by “friends” which was not public.

You're right, it looks worse.

This data breach is different in nature. It is not same as Ashley Madison or Experian where someone got hold of root pwd or some other data storage (some form of hacking involved). This is about third party using Facebook's API to access user data and exploiting those API to retrieve hoards of information about a particular user. IN this case, Facebook most likely knew which third party developer was heavily hitting a certain API in a certain pattern but they decided to turn a blind eye.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com