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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick:

1) Prompting users to give Facebook their email passwords.[0]

2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1]

3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2]

It's pretty impressive that a company could do something so brazenly malevolent and be confident that they will escape with no more than a fine.

[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyond-sketchy-facebook-demand...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/18/facebook-...

[2] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds...

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I'm ashamed to say that up until now, when I saw Facebook (or similar) acting evil I thought about the quote, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

Well, fuck that and fuck me, those people are not idiots, they're criminals.

Except the quote is generally wrong when it comes to issues of profit. It's simply backwards. People are fucking evil when it comes to money, profits, power, status, pleasure, and generally getting ahead of others. Considering those are the main motivators for almost all human actions, Hanlon's razor is clearly a bunch of bullshit that people spread around to end actual debate and discussions they don't like.

I don't think the quote is wrong, it's just that some things aren't well explained by stupidity. "Oops, we accidentally stole your data and used it" isn't explainable by stupidity but is explainable by malice.

In other words, Hanlon's Razer doesn't say that there is no such thing as malice just that you shouldn't default to assuming malice.

Yes. I'm saying that you should default to assuming malice because in most human endeavors and motives it's the primary factor. Even stupid people can and are evil. The motives I list above cover probably over 90% of human actions. Although that's just my own guess as to percentage, that means hanlon's razor is useful only ten percent of the time.

That gets me every time I read in the media about a 'bug' that enabled some complex data transfer. People, somebody has to decide, plan, code, test and deploy the behaviour, and make sure it works. And yet, people accept the explanation it seems without much thought.

The email contacts feature already existed but was disabled in the past, so it just needed to be a Boolean switch. Like anyone who uses Messenger, I can believe they could introduce a regression and never fix it.

Sorry but I think you're being too hard on yourself, while also being inappropriately diplomatic toward Facebook. I mean, crimes happen all the time. I'm a criminal, I speed sometimes, I often jaywalk. I would say they are malicious, and have forfeited whatever position as a trustee of data that people have ever granted them. What do you do with a trustee who puts their interest before the beneficiary? Of course, you fire them. But indeed who is the beneficiary? At least in their public vernacular it's the user, even though more well read individuals know the beneficiary is the trustee, one in the same.

Facebook is perhaps not out of the ordinary really, it's just another of a variety of businesses who have come to realize they hate having users. They just need their data. Vampires don't want human friends either, they just need their blood.

I always took that quote is the default, to be disproven by significant evidence to the contrary, or Mark Zuckerberg in other words.

Not to contradict your overall sentiment, but people often focus on intention with these issues. I think that's wrong.

Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet.

We need to be more dispassionate when discussing these issues because otherwise threads like this descend into analysis of whether Zuckerberg/Bezos/whoever is a moral person. Which is a)probably unknowable and b)besides the point.

There is a problem here with a very big company that has more power than it knows how to handle, which can probably only be mitigated by breaking it up. That's all there is to it, really.

[edit] Just as an addendum, that's not to say that if the company has done something illegal, the people responsible shouldn't be prosecuted- they should.

Words like malice and evil require intent. If we don't want the conversation to be about intent, we should use words like amoral. Facebook isn't actively trying to harm their customers, they simply don't care about them. That is amoral not evil.

> Facebook isn't actively trying to harm their customers, they simply don't care about them. That is amoral not evil.

Don't bend yourself out of shape. Actively, happily ignoring the evil you have caused and continue to cause is evil.

That isn't evil. You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil. You wouldn't call a person who kills someone in a no fault car accident evil. Evil isn't about results. It is about intent and motive.

You can call Facebook a number of things from amoral to negligent or even criminal, but once you start talking about evilness you have to start judging their intentions and motives.

> That isn't evil. You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil. You wouldn't call a person who kills someone in a no fault car accident evil.

All of these things are no one's fault.

> Evil isn't about results. It is about intent and motive.

Exactly. Prioritizing profit at the cost of customers' well-being is a deliberate decision; if not, seeing that customers are harmed by your own, continued actions and doing nothing to change it is, to me, actively being evil. Your intent may not be exactly to harm, but you have no problem harming people to get there. There is no difference.

I think that is just too broad of a definition for evil. According to that, everyone who isn't carbon neutral would be evil. We are worsening climate change through our "own, continued actions and doing nothing to change it". And if we are all evil then evilness has no real meaning.

> According to that, everyone who isn't carbon neutral would be evil.

While I agree that it's useful to maintain some nuance in our perspectives, generally I think it's better to recognize and realign our actions, not definitions. It's the difference between accidentally hitting someone, and accidentally hitting someone and proceeding to run them over.

And to your example, I think we know most people aren't really aware of what is going on. Another group of people don't believe it at all, a combination of ignorance and poor government. We're all human; that means something.

Lets say Mark gets in a waterballoon fight, but with the balloons full of gasoline. Lets say this happens in hospital. Mark is aware that his behavior is likely to result in great harm, many deaths. He doesn't _want_ people to die, it's not his goal, he just doesn't care that he's putting them in danger. He wants to have fun with his balloons, and that's all that matters to him.

Mark isn't trying to kill people. Mark _is_ evil, because he chooses to take actions that are likely to cause great harm.

> You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil.

No, but you would call it evil if someone repeatedly built rickety buildings in a hurricane zone or built structures out of dry wood and paper next to a forest at high risk for a forest fire, and then acted like they had no responsibility when the buildings repeatedly got destroyed by fires and hurricanes and people's personal property got lost forever or looted in the resulting disorder.

> You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil.

That's ridiculous, neither hurricanes nor fire possess free will. I bet you would call someone who intentionally starts those things evil, though

Hurricanes and fire aren't "actively, happily ignoring the evil"...

Unless you're an animist, I guess.

Evil and amoral lie on a spectrum (with things like "altruistic" and "noble" on the other end).

Trying to fit things into neat little boxes so you can apply words to them isn't particularly helpful. What Facebook is doing is some form of wrong. They aren't murdering children, but still, what they are doing is not good and they are doing it at a massive scale, so the harm is multiplied.

> which can probably only be mitigated by breaking it up.

I think about this a lot with regard to Big Tech. For some companies it looks easy and obvious (e.g., Amazon spins off AWS). For Facebook is it really as obvious as "spin off Instagram"? I'm not really convinced of that. It seems like their power is so ingrained in Facebook itself that it's not immediately obvious what splicing off Instagram would do. What would we actually want to accomplish?

Honestly I can't say if it's definitely the right course of action, although in the last few years there have been reports of millions of 16-35 year-old Americans leaving Facebook, only to move to Instagram. I do think the ability of these companies to buy their nearest rivals is an antitrust issue that needs addressing, for the health of this relatively new market, if nothing else.

AWS + Amazon doesn’t seem obvious to me; would there be much to gain from breaking up a conglomerate into several businesses, when those separate businesses are in entirely different verticals?

I suppose breaking off AWS might lower Amazon’s ability to subsidize an unprofitable retail business in search of market share, though that is probably a moot point now that Amazon is raising its prices in search of profitability and is likely to stop being the de facto online shopping destination now that other online retailers are also standardizing in two day shipping and easy returns (often easier due to providing return labels in the box).

Might run fewer brick and mortar stores out of business before being forced to sell at a profit.

Inspector Javert, is that you? Going to lock me away forever for stealing bread to feed my sister's starving kids?

She can't afford bread for the kids on a FAANG salary? Silicon Valley prices have become ridiculous.

There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection.

Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to making sure it never happens again will be very different.

Criminal prosecution for dog poo? You must be kidding me.

Wouldn't the intentional smearing of feces over someones carpet throughout their home qualify as vandalism?

Right.

That's like saying there's not a difference in involuntary manslaughter and murder.

There is. Intent is very important. That's WHY so many people focus on the intention.

A logical reason to care about intent is that malicious people will likely do it again and can not be trusted in the future where as people who make a mistake will avoid doing it again

For a corporation, "avoiding doing it again" means dedicating resources to preventing a repeat of that type of "mistake": audits, privacy reviews, etc.

The choice not to dedicate those resources up front was an intentional one.

> There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection.

But the point is that this assumes you're able to tell the difference between the two cases- intent is often a really hard thing to prove. And often discussions about whether Facebook acted in good faith when it did certain things neglect the fact that they made a big mess everywhere, that needs sorting out regardless of their intent.

> hard thing to prove

It is and yet the legal system is busy with these sorts of proves all the time. e.g. if you have a professional insurance and caused some damage by mistake - that's covered, if you cause damage deliberately - it's not.

It's hard to prove but for some strange reason they always have the resources when it's time to come after the little guy and they don't when it's the big guy and it's also more obvious

But if we can reduce that to a second-order effect we will be better off. For example, if you made the rule ('regulation') that "shoes shall not be worn in the house" then you can avert the situation and never need to try to determine motivation.

I think this is basic good that regulations- thoughtful ones- serv. Because if Facebook makes money by being evil, then their competitors will be pressured to do the same in order to stay in business. But by leveling the playing field you can help prevent these monopolies from getting so big and powerful.

We can't rely on businesses to act "morally." That ship has sailed. We have to compel them to behave, not by social shaming but by making non-compliance painful and repeated non-compliance an existential threat.

Analogies break down due to the difference of scale between individuals and the biggest companies in the world.

If a company makes an "innocent" unintentional mistake, it can be attributed in part to their choosing not to put resources towards detecting and avoiding that kind of error

Repeated behavior probably has to be taken into account also, like if your friend does it 10 times - you'll want to break up that friendship.

It's hardly an accident at that point anymore, but intentionally or (intentionally) carelessly done. That's where we are with Facebook I think.

> Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional.

I disagree that it's likewise for big companies. Corporations like that don't really have intentions; every intention is fundamentally about profit. Profit is in fact both its intention as well as its reward/punishment.

It's really the only way to properly "communicate" with an entity like that. A corporation is not a human being. And just like it's not useful to try to reason with (or attribute human-like intention to) a cat, it's basically futile to do so with a corporation.

Any time that human-like reasoning seems to apply with a corporation, it really only happened because the reasoning happens to align with its profit intentions.

Edit: this is less true for smaller companies, but for a multinational it's pretty much a given.

Also, there's something in the way that large companies are structured, that actual accountability (like you'd find with humans or small groups) seems to disappear and slip between the gaps of hierarchy. Lacking accountability, attributing intent becomes guesswork.

Seems to be intentional as a system for taking a user's password, scanning their contacts and then uploading them requires specifically built tools with intention. Stepping in dog poo and tracking it into a house requires only shoes that you already wear and walking that you already do. That doesn't require any new intentions or tools to be built

>Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet.

Have to disagree with this; I am much more forgiving of accidental harm than intentional harm. And speaking of dogs, pretty sure my dog understands this as well, since there's barking if he thinks I did something on purpose but accidentally stepping on him doesn't elicit the same response.

Who was talking about forgiveness? I thought we were discussing ethics here. No amount of good intentions will make Zuckerberg's actions moral... at least the actions of which I'm aware.

I think one thing missing in the responses here is that there is some culpability without intent. Assume there was not ill intent, the fact that so many things that went on still happens, means they didn't have sufficient controls, or checks and balances in the practices to prevent it from happening. That lack of control is itself part of the problem, and something they could have fixed any number of times.

My 9 year old son always rightfully claims that many of the harmful things he does was accidental. The problem is that he frequently leaves little margin for error in a lot of things he does. Follows his sister just a few feet behind his bike; of course your going to run into her if she stops quickly. Stacking your bowl, cup and silverware on your plate then bring it up one handed; of course they're going to spill.

Facebook's internal controls and practices are insufficient to manage their business. It doesn't matter if they didn't willfully intend to do all of the shit they did. They did intentionally create the controls, practices, and culture in place that allowed it to happen.

> if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet

Yes, but if someone treads dog poo into your house every day for a year, their repeated claims that it was a mistake every time are not going to carry as much weight. With FB we're not talking about a single incident of treading dog poo; we're talking about a repeated pattern of getting dog poo all over the place.

> a repeated pattern of getting dog poo all over the place

a woeful understatement, in my opinion; more like bulldozing manure into you and your neighbor's house.

actus reaus vs. mens rea.

We do distinguish manslaughter and murder however. Someone dies either way, but in that case intent matters.

I think in most of these cases the intent should simply unleash an additional charge or penalty - leading to the imprisonment of executives.

If my company accidentally does something extremely stupid or negligent, or against the interests of my customers, fine me enough to ensure I create systems and oversight to attempt very hard not to.

If it turns out I was doing so intentionally, lock me up and throw away the key.

So, whether it's your own two year old or a malicious adult, you think it's wrong to respond differently because they both produced the same harm?

I think it's not wrong to treat an adult exactly like you would a child if he's acting like one. I interpret parent poster as trying to make a point about how we cannot tell anything about intent so we should judge on the action, solely.

> I think it's not wrong to treat an adult exactly like you would a child if he's acting like one.

So, are you saying that the malicious adult poo-tracker is being childish and should be treated with the leniency we afford to children?

> I interpret parent poster as trying to make a point about how we cannot tell anything about intent so we should judge on the action, solely.

Why on Earth do you think we can't deduce someone's intent? In the case I posited, you can know the intent of both the child (no malicious intent) and the malicious poo-tracker (malicious intent). In many other cases, you can also deduce intent from someone's behavior.

>> ...

No, I'm not saying that. Take it easy bro. Why you all angry and shit?

Disagree. I can live with things being shitty if we're all on the same side and trying. Intent is everything.

Thank you for choosing such an apt metaphor. It has made the followup threads a much better read.

Isn't the presence of motive one of the cornerstones of a criminal investigation.

Conclusion of the year. Kudos.

Come on, you knew facebook was evil. Most people know facebook is evil. We choose to ignore it because otherwise we would feel obligated to change. Change would come at the expense of "likes" and other modes of social validation.

People are realizing that social validation is becoming less validated by social media. (Lets remove the likes on IG!!). The people coming around now are sheep looking for the next wave of validation.

Maybe I misread, but none of the articles linked above suggest any malicious intent. Could you clarify what specifically you're referring to?

Making money off "mistakes" that keep happening, darn it!

I don't think they can make money off plain text passwords? They can only lose money from that, if it's discovered and they are fined and lose some users.

They can make money from contact lists, but IIUC the article said they didn't use the contact lists. Also, given that it only affected a couple million users (like 0.1% of their user base), the damage to their reputation would far outweigh any benefits of actually using those contact lists.

On the last item, the collection of email passwords, the only benefit would be if they actually use those passwords to get information, so the above point covers it.

Let me know if I'm missing something.

how about extracting a user's contacts with their plaintext passwords that would usually be hashed into a database (at least in my professional experience) and thus unusable by facebook?

You can do many evil things with passwords. But, according to the articles, that's not what happened. They did download contact lists, even though they never used the plaintext passwords they stored in the logs. The users involved in the two incidents were different.

Storing plain text passwords doesn't make them money, but it negatively affects users, should those passwords be compromised. Though FB didn't prosper from the mistake, users potentially feel a cost, so the outcome is the same. Criminal negligence might not benefit the bad actor, but it's still a crime either way.

or using the plaintext passwords to extract a user's contacts when hashing it into a database would prevent facebook from impersonating that user and logging in to access their non-facebook social graph?

Yes that's a good point.

It's a bit like Exxon Valdez: they don't profit from spilling oil in the ocean, but they should still be penalized for cutting corners on safety.

> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

My response to that quote is, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."

I think that is the perception that needs to change, some actions certainly can't be explained with "move fast and break things".

Some actions move into the criminal areas, like tricking users for passwords and phone number to then use that for other purposes to further their own agenda. That could indeed be seen as criminal I think.

And someone has to be held accountable.

>Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

I find that the people who use that quote are most often both.

I’d prefer to say negligence than stupidity. Being stupid isn’t something you can avoid, but being negligent is something within their power to avoid and is a legitimate target of legal sanction.

> 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2]

in logs.

If you're a small business - I get it, it's good to whitelist whatever information you're logging explicitly, but for smaller teams a hard to diagnose issue might lead the team to "log everything so we can sort it out later". Facebook is Facebook, whether this decision was the product of the corporation as a whole, a small dev team, or a highly paid consultant/third party, Facebook is a big enough company that they don't have the "I didn't realize..." excuse anymore.

Seems like a pretty trivial automated test for so many PHD's to miss:

  create_user('Bob', 'BobPassword123')
  assert "BobPassword123" not in logfile

Hrm, so you checked the apache access logs, or maybe an error log, what about the system logs? Does the login request spin up a bash script and pass the password to it?

I don't think it's trivial to guarantee non-existence.

> I don't think it's trivial to guarantee non-existence.

I disagree in this case. Log messages don't spontaneously appear in arbitrary places. If the developers understand what their software is doing and how their systems are configured then they should know where to check for the logging messages.

Until someone turned on logging of the full request body on the load balancer/proxy or otherwise unknown-to-you middlebox that was the TLS termination point in production that you did not know about

So their incompetence lies in lacking configuration management in production as opposed to a lack of testing? Why are they manually configuring production servers anyway at that scale?

They are managing a lot of things, they have full responsibility to be aware of these things as a company but I'd guess that with the scale of ops Facebook has regular developers never interact with the team that's managing their attempt at high availability by scattering servers across different hosts, data centers, legal jurisdictions etc. in fact I'd imagine at a op the size of Facebook that sort of problem has a dedicated department.

That said, someone should have been watching for this stuff and failed to do so (or to exist), so I'm not excusing them - but this is not a trivial thing to protect against.

You speak with the hubris of a man that's never been in the arena.

Facebook hires some of the top software developers and engineers on the planet, if not leaking plaintext passwords is too high of an expectation for them then nothing that isn't public knowledge should ever be put into any computer system. As a profession we should demand our peers do better than this.

We're all people of varying skills, I would never assume an innate high bar for any activity a human does - only by requiring the bar be maintained at a level and regularly checking and enforcing that requirement can we be reasonably sure it is - and this isn't just `echo $password` the way these passwords got into the log file is (from what I've been able to discern) pretty obscure and round about - Facebook is absolutely responsible and needs to be held to account, but the mistake is understandable.

It's not really that simple. Sometimes you need to enable request logging in production... maybe for performance analysis, maybe for debugging.

And you make sure that you can purge the logs afterwards.

And? That doesn't change anything I said. The new logging config isn't magic, either, and the new set of log files can be scanned, too.

With billions of dollars and some the best software developers in the world (supposedly), Facebook should be able to figure this out.

Run the deployment in docker, check every file changed in the container for it’s contents.

yeah well we're not running apache >wut is this post?

Seems like a useless test considering how many actual production systems don’t log to local disk.

Ah yes, the single, non-distributed, file-backed log Facebook uses.

You have no problem with the create_user function? Obviously it's pseudocode my point is there are a finite number of log locations and checking for an instance of a known string among them isn't difficult.

There are a finite number of log locations now. How do you intend to operate an integration test across the entirety of Facebook's stack to detect new log locations?

Change requests and a change review board staffed by professionals.

Subject: Change Request

Body: I would like to log the body of authentication requests in production.

Subject Re: Change Request

Body: How will you ensure personal data is not stored that shouldn't be?

Subject: Re: Re: Change Request

Body: I will add configuration Y to logging system X.

Bureaucracy like this is what kills teams and products. There's no guarantee it works, and every change or commit should already have privacy and data protection in mind anyway. You also don't know what you don't know - you could for all your knowledge think that nothing is being logged, when in fact there's a subsystem outside your scope that's actually doing the logging.

You assert that it's trivial, yet you're adding more layers to protect against something like that from happening. It's the naivety that all problems are trivial is what gets people and companies into trouble in the first place

I promise you the productivity loss of sending a few emails is much less than 5 billion dollars.

Change1: Enable logging of middleware traffic on 0.01% of requests for better profiling.

Reviewer: Does this have privacy implications?

Change1: No, Service X marks all PII before this point. Code X drops everything marked in this way.

Two years later.

Change N: Modify request structure for more optimal blah blah blah.

Now suddenly the changed request structure causes a regression in the PII detection which causes some logging of PII.

This shit is way more complex than "just stop people when they ask to log passwords".

You assume that all logging happens within an application. It doesn't.

The point is aptly demonstrated within this thread; sometimes things that look trivial at a glance aren't so trivial in reality.

What if it logs "BobPassw[...]"? Is that more acceptable?

What if there is a bug and some other function logs "[...]word123"?

If it turns out to be that simple to write a test, it probably didn't happen by accident. Many systems are more difficult to write tests for.

Of course we (and they) should do it anyway, but it does often take an investment in making things testable.

I've worked for multiple Fortune 25 companies, and that excuse does not fly. Not in banking or healthcare, where breaches of privacy/confidentiality are actually illegal, rather than merely distasteful. Small teams and careless devs doing that sort of bad logging will be caught and corrected by strict security oversight.

This is the sort of thing that leads the HN crowd to sneer at the old, slow ways of the enterprise world.

The passwords in plaintext wasn't a breach or a leak. If you punish Facebook for it, they would be less inclined to share such information in the future.

That's how you handle children, though. No one is going to ignore wrongdoings in hopes the perp will continue to play nicely.

If we can't trust a company to audit themselves fairly (in fact, we can't generally) then they should bear the burden of paying for an external audit of their processes, many "boring" industries have these sorts of requirements.

There might not have been a large-scale public data dump of passwords, but if 20,000[1] employees had access to logs with plaintext passwords, there is no guarantee I could ever accept that zero of them read or used customer passwords for personal purposes.

What's to stop a malicious ex-lover from grabbing a FB password and reading that person's private messages? If FB didn't even know there were passwords in plaintext, they very likely weren't auditing log access as much as was needed.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/21/18275837/facebook-plain-t...

Malicious insiders don't need your password to access your data. If you are concerned about malicious insiders then plaintext password logs don't matter.

With FB's dataset and employee count, it would be insane not to be concerned with malicious insiders. Even if you completely discount morality and honesty where Facebook is concerned (and I do), there's substantial liability risk, PR risk, regulatory risk and commercial paranoia, which I suspect was likely their biggest concern, at least until recently.

I'm more concerned with plaintext passwords because most people use the same passwords over and over, so if you can break one system, you can break others.

There's a dead sibling to my comment mentioning that your congruence.io website has an expired SSL certificate, fyi.

There is no oversight in a Devops world. New systems come up in protoduction, celebrations are had, and the data protection officers and security compliance officers remain in blissful ignorance.

I'm on a small team (5 engineers) that is GDPR compliant so no PII is logged. It's not hard if you care.

Its a lot easier on a small team. Security isn't a stable state.

I'm replying to the parent who made the opposite assertion

I can't f'in believe I have to explicate such simple things to supposedly intelligent and thoughtful people

Great—so potentially subject to even less security/privacy controls compared to other places they could've stored it.

Which is the NUMBER ONE MOST BASIC rule of handling users confidential data. It reflects incredibly poorly on the engineering practices of Facebook that this managed to get through. It should be a criminal liability.

I'm not arguing this wasn't a bad thing but comment made it sound like they were storing plaintext passwords in the database circa 2002.

Storing them in logs is the same thing IMO. Logs are usually more easily accessible than a user database.

Gonna have to disagree.

I think it would be way worse if we found out they were storing passwords were plaintext in the database in 2019. Even if the security implications are the same/worse, the policy/decision making of such a revelation would be beyond terrible.

edit: To put it another way, remote code execution flaws are terrible but they can happen. However it would be way worse if someone put in a static username/password backdoor. The security outcome may be the same but one is beyond terrible policy/decision making.

As is the policy/decision making that results in logs having the passwords - you can still have very locked down database access. Logs tend to get spread around all sorts of systems, and access control for logs is almost ALWAYS lower than DB keys. They're also cached for search-ability on any number of elasticsearch or business intelligence platforms, so getting rid of them after the fact is even harder. At the very least its an equivalent problem.

Logs tend to be ephemeral with limited retention.

even worse

That's still a pretty elementary error for a company that gets off on using CS-y riddles in interviews like Google used to. Move fast and break things, and then get a $5B fine.

> in logs.

... for seven years.

So, it's not in plaintext if it is in logs? Storing passwords in logs is even worse than on a database since access more likely is less restrictive. Every programmer worth its salt knows about this problem (I surely wrote code to prevent this).

Sorry, but it is like saying "there is no SQL injection, only bad input validation".

The first thing I did after setting up Jenkins for our small dev shop was to find and install and test a plugin that removes all kinds of credentials from the logs. And I'm just a developer, and I never claimed nor think that I have any devops or administration qualifications - just common sense.

If Facebook devops engineers, who are probably among the best trained and highest paid on the planet, lack the same common sense for their users passwords... I can't even come up with an ending to this sentence that would properly express my emotions right now.

> 2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1]

If they wanted to show proper contrition, they'd not only delete that information from their systems, they'd also remove all links in the social graphs that can be in any way a result of that information. They'd also take 100% of their revenue that was even slightly influenced/generated by the inappropriately gather data and send it out to the users whose data was copied without permission.

Also they should probably put together a legal team who will be ready to start handling the $150,000 per copied item that they didn't have the right to copy. :lol

LinkedIn was caught harvesting people's contacts with dark patterns. They settled a class action suit for $13M.

They weren't using the cleartext password to scrape contacts, though, were they?

LinkedIn did in fact have that as an explicit feature where users would insert their email password on LinkedIn’s website.

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/5204/email-pas...

> If your email provider doesn't support OAuth, you'll need to enter your email password before clicking Continue. LinkedIn will use your password only for a moment to authenticate your account. We don't store or save your email password during this process.

Facebook’s feature was similar I believe. Where they stumbled was connecting an email verification feature to the code written almost a decade ago for contact import.

I remember the era started by Sean Parker with Plaxo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaxo ... Everybody was doing it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-give-us-your-email-pass...

In 2008-2010 companies had the chance to harvest millions of emails and other personal data. The opportunity is not likely to come back this easily.

Shutting down these options, even if it is the right things to do for the users, is effectively increasing the barriers of entry and reducing the growing speed of new companies. The result is that those companies will maintain a dominant position on the market.

Let's hope this fine doesn't cover those actions and prevent any real justice from being meted out.

If I understand this right, #3 happened and was (allegedly) resolved before #1 and #2 happened, so that's not a fair shake. #1 and #2 are still valid points.

Is there anything left I can do to escape Facebook? This is just depressing for someone who was in college when FB came out and never signed up. Nor any other social network (still a favorite oxymoron) since.

What kind of a profile of me would they be able to glean from email? Whole thing feels so fucking invasive.

Spotted this in the guardian link:

>> “When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people’s email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account,”

Im struggling with the "unintentionally" part and to play devils advocate trying to figure out if it could be possible. Perhaps they had a service already that performed the login to upload peoples contacts on request and to save time reused this service to also verify the account?

>Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick

You're under the impression that regulators are in the business of bankrupting companies.

All the instances you cited of Facebook's wrongdoing are not worth a $50billion(!!) fine. They just aren't.

nothing linkedin hasn't done. (don't know about the plaintext passwords)

[I meant this as a serious observation, linkedin was sued but I believe they only got a mild slap on the wrist]

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