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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Kinda weird. We (Australia) have a new major data breach every month. Seems strange to single out Meta, what about Optus, St Vincent’s, Dymocks, the AFP (!), the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (hardly surpising, with their 1990s website), Pizza Hut, the Royal Women’s Hospital, and about 100 (not hyperbole) others?

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We (Australia) have no enforceable privacy legislation. The choice to single out Meta is probably political, though could also be about scale, and being a huge foreign company with deep pockets.

>[...]personal information of some Australian Facebook users was disclosed to the This is Your Digital Life app in breach of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). The information was exposed to the risk of disclosure to Cambridge Analytica and other third parties, and risked being used for political profiling purposes. [...]

The relevant law had been in force for two decades before facebook ever became relevant.

I think this is the first actual settlement in the 20 years those rules have been on the books?

Here's a few more: https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-assessments-and-deci...

Thank you for the correction there have been way more of these than I thought.

It seems they are referring to this as a "landmark" ruling because it's the first one with a "payout" condition.

It's not the first but they are extremely rare.

My understanding is that the difference is that the Meta-Cambridge Analytica situation wasn't a 'hack' data breach, it was Facebook sharing data in breach of existing Australian privacy laws.

ie. Meta is at fault, as opposed to a criminal intruder.

It was an API. After years of getting shit for not opening their social graph. To this day I don't understand how the world decided that was a big deal.

I don't recall any complaints about facebook not posting everyones private information publicly or selling it to the lowest and highest bidder.

I do, before there was a sea of games on facebook, before facebook apps, people were clamoring for the API access. It was supposed to be the next big thing and everyone made integrations with it, you'd log your spotify listening queue to it, etc. Developers were very happy when the API came to be. Then later people became aware of how much access you could actually get and especially if you saved the data locally. Then the FTC fined them for it and everyone tightened things down, not just Facebook. I at least remember it like this, with that first part.

Because it helped influence elections

In what way? I've read quite a bit and still can't get it. Also "influencing elections" is a funny thing to define. I know these days every joe and mary walking down the street is protecting democracy and whatnot, but the Cambridge Analytica debacle was just politicians learning about APIs from my current understanding. Anyone using the FB API at the time could have done the same if they infringed the terms in the same way CA did.

Are campaigns influencing elections when they use credit card purchasing data and so on that they buy? Why isn't that the same scandal?

The incident that lead to this occurred 8 years ago, and the incidents you cite happened much more recently. I have no idea if any enforcement action is ongoing in those cases, but perhaps you should consider checking before posting an angry comment, or you could instead direct your ire towards why the process is so slow.

Because it’s harder to prosecute incompetence.

The Australian government is targeting Meta on a wide range of issues and will keep doing so until they transfer more money to news oligarchs to compensate them for "loss of business model".

This is how you know the (old) media mongrels have bought out the australian gov't.

I am vehemently against it, but no matter which party you choose to vote for, the result has been the same.

Whilst I agree with the sentiment, most definitely in the case of social networks funding old media for the privilege of linking to their news sources, I think in this case Meta "did something egregiously wrong" that was also illegal according to Australian privacy law.

(Aside: An amusing thought experiment is how voraciously would the Australian government pursue Murdoch's media empire had it committed a similar act? A $50 million fine would kill it's Australian enterprise, or at least be nearly-fatal, I'd hope...)

the greens could always use more votes

Adam Bandt is one of the most powerful figure in Australian politics, he does not need help.

I dunno, techbro. Somehow Meta being the victim here is not the key takeaway that springs to my mind, you know?

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