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Comment by verylittlemeat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

You're right, it looks worse.

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