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Comment by kreetx | Hacker News Reader

Sincere question: this article in the last paragraph says "Facebook threatening defamation against the Guardian for calling this a data breach is ludicrous and Facebook should be ashamed and apologize"

-- does this conclusion hinge on the fact that Facebook should have realized earlier that the app is harvesting data? If the creator of the app said that he is doing it for academic purposes only then how should have Facebook known? Not trying to defend Facebook, but calling this a breach is at least a little bit gray area, no?

EDIT: concise wording

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A breach is unauthorized access, possession, or use of data. Cambridge Analytica was not allowed to retain this data, or to use it for commercial purposes. Therefore it’s a data breach.

Consider an alternative scenario: a Facebook employee has access to data to perform his job. He makes a copy, takes it with him, and uses it in his new startup. Breach? It’s exactly the same as above, only the employee was an external partner in reality.

Yes, the situation you described is a breach. It became a breach when the employee made a copy and took it outside of production.

But it doesn't look like Facebook's fault since the situatuation is entirely in the hands of the person who made the app.

But I see the point of this being a breach, and suing based on this does then look as the article says. :)

If it's a "little bit gray", then you probably shouldn't sue for defamation about it.

The "breach"/"something-else-that's-not-a-breach" debate from what I've seen doesn't hinge on Facebook knowing or not, it's about if all loss of data can be called a breach or if the term should be reserved for cases where the perpetrator did aquire the data without Facebook knowing.

How would that not be a breach? Their system allowed a malicious entity acting in bad faith to gain large amounts of data under false pretenses. If they got the data by pretending to be an employee and social engineering their way into the data that way facebook would 100% call that a breach. Is this that different?

"The processor is, in fact, operating as it is designed"

- Steve Smith (Vice President, Intel)

I don't think it's so clear. Two things happened:

(a) Users were duped into giving up their data under a false pretense. This alone cannot be called a breach.

Also, one of the following occurred:

(b.1) Facebook was duped into letting a fraudster install an app on their platform. If this happened, it was a breach.

(b.2) Facebook knew all along that the academic research was only a cover for duping users into giving up their data. If this happened then it was not a breach, because Facebook themselves effectively sold the data.

So what Facebook appears to be saying is: There was no breach. We sold the data!

[Edit] Judging by what this man says, it was probably b.2: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-c...

My conclusion is that there was no breach.

A small point, but one that FB uses in its defense: it does not charge for API usage

Because they know that apps make money through Facebook ads and they do charge for those. If Facebook knew about the true purpose of this sort of app, then they also knew that they were going to make a lot of money off of it.

Well, the difference is that it was not unauthorized access. It was allowed by Facebook on purpose, because this is their business model.

It is WORSE than a breach, because FB is complicit.

> It is WORSE than a breach, because FB is complicit.

A breach in which the custodian is complicit is still a breach, not something worse. Obviously, the its worse from the perspective of the custodians degree of responsibility if they are actively malicious rather than negligent or innocent, but this is still within the usual definition of a breach of private data. A breach is about the subject’s privacy being violated, which can happen with or without the complicity of the custodian of the data.

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