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Comment by storus | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Hacker News feature an article on their home page at some point (10 years ago?) that at that time Facebook misconfigured something and users could observe their data being fed directly to some Israeli intelligence company? That was the day I deleted my FB account and never looked at anything they offer anymore.

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At this point it’s best to assume that everything you communicate is being collected in some way.

There are very, very few apps I really trust. E.g. the only mechanism I trust for communicating passwords securely is GPG, I wouldn’t even use Signal for that.

Unless you owner of the app and what they are doing exactly you can’t trust anyone. You don’t know what they are going through or if they sold the app to someone or had a certain code implementation that leaks all of your data. I stopped using Chrome when I had clear evidence of it leaking data - urls visited.

Are you thinking of Cambridge Analytica? That was a British company, not Israeli.

No, CA was later. This incident was earlier in FB's lifecycle.

Would love a link to this story if you find it.

It might be related to this [2015] but that was a hoax. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374028

No, it was something else but I can't find it via HN search anymore. I think it was in 2013-2014, which is timeframe when I deleted my FB account (that for some reason kept living for many years as I was told).

Onavo VPN maybe? 2018

Onavo Protect, the VPN client from the data-security app maker acquired by Facebook back in 2013, has now popped up in the Facebook iOS app itself, under the banner “Protect” in the navigation menu. Clicking through on “Protect” will redirect Facebook users to the “Onavo Protect – VPN Security” app’s listing on the App Store.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-it...

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