Hacker News Reader

Comment by techiferous | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't bother me.

#1: The protection against data that would require "disproportionate effort" seems like a valid protection of the company. A company the size of Facebook surely has very complex databases, logs, and caches going on, so that if they had to literally fetch all the data they have about a user, I could see this becoming quite a project.

#2: I would consider data models a trade secret. So if the personal data contains information that belies the underlying structure, I'm okay with the data being "scrubbed" clean of anything that would potentially give competitors a peek into the underlying engineering.

Note that I canceled my Facebook account long ago because I think Facebook is a system that is structured so that the users' best interests are not a priority. But this doesn't mean that everything Facebook does is bad or is against users' privacy, so I find this article to be a bit sensationalist.

View on HN

#1: A large company called Sony recently had almost 100 million accounts stolen from PSN. We all assumed that because they're big, they wouldn't do stupid things like store our passwords or credit card numbers in plaintext.

If Facebook can't fetch data from its own infrastructure, I would be seriously worried, more so than I am right now.

#2: I understand them wanting to preserve trade secrets like facial recognition, but I still would like a general idea of /every single thing/ Facebook has on me. That's like a bank storing a bunch of information on me while refusing to disclose certain parts of my bank account because they're "trade secrets".

You're right, not everything Facebook does is bad. But they don't have the users' best interests at hand and when you need to worry about a site tracking you across the Internet simply because you have an account and they can, that's the time to worry. I'm surprised we haven't seen more lawsuits than the media is reporting.

#1: How is that at all relevant? Did Sony at some point claim they were unable to retrieve users' passwords without disproportionate effort?

Because Sony decided to add a mandatory arbitration clause to get around the lawsuits resulting from the disclosure of 100,000,000+ names, addresses and credit cards. http://www.gamepolitics.com/2011/09/15/sony-adds-mandatory-a...

Can you rephrase that to include the words "disproportionate effort" so it gives the illusion of being relevant?

The OP mentioned that Facebook is a big corporation so they clearly must have secure data structures and invincibility from all attacks ever. I'm just pointing out that to support my point -- Facebook has the ability to fetch the data but really doesn't want to. Secure data structures have nothing to do with it, they don't prevent the fetching of data. And if Facebook is smart, they don't just throw things around randomly in the database without rhyme or reason.

What? No one said anything about invincibility from attack, or security in general. And the point was that they have a complex infrastructure, not that they throw things around randomly without rhyme or reason.

http://www.fbi.gov/foia/

"Our files are generally indexed in our Central Records System. This computerized index contains most of our records; some of our earliest records are not indexed."

Thank you for a well-thought out response that comes to a non-popular conclusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com