![]() The data breach is likely covered by Europe’s strict new privacy rules, known as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018. Through a number of channels, it sought contact and answers from Facebook,” a spokesperson said in a statement issued on Tuesday. It received no proactive communication from Facebook. ![]() ![]() “The DPC attempted over the weekend to establish the full facts and is continuing to do so. In Ireland, the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC)-which has the power to levy a fine of up to 4% of global turnover or around $3.5 billion-has slammed the company for failing to inform it of the breach. While Facebook is attempting to downplay the seriousness of the leak, the decision about how serious this is does not lie with the company alone. Troy Hunt, a cyber security consultant and founder of Have I Been Pwned has uploaded the entire leaked database to his website that allows anyone to check whether their phone number is listed in the leaked database. Thankfully for the half a billion Facebook users who’ve been impacted by the breach, there’s a more practical way to get help. It’s an audacious move for a company worth over $300 billion, with $61 billion cash on hand, to ask its users to secure their own information, especially considering how byzantine and complex the company’s settings menus can be. We also recommend people do regular privacy checkups to make sure that their settings are in the right place, including who can see certain information on their profile and enabling two-factor authentication.” “In this case, updating the ‘How People Find and Contact You’ control could be helpful. “While we addressed the issue identified in 2019, it’s always good for everyone to make sure that their settings align with what they want to be sharing publicly,” Clark wrote. This is the identical excuse given in 2018, when it was revealed that Facebook had given Cambridge Analytica the data of 87 million users without their permission, for use in political ads.Ĭlark goes on to explain that the people who collected this data-sorry, “scraped” this data-did so by using a feature designed to help new users find their friends on the platform.īut for users whose phone numbers were being traded freely online, possibly the most aggravating part of Clark’s post is when he puts the onus on users to protect the data that Facebook itself required users to hand over in the name of “security.” “It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019,” Clark wrote. So instead of apologizing for failing to keep users’ data secure, Facebook’s product management director Mike Clark began his blog post by making a semantic point about how the data was leaked. Facebook initially dismissed the reports as irrelevant, claiming the data was leaked years ago and so the fact it had all been collected into one uber database containing one in every 15 people on the planet-and was now being given away for free-didn’t really matter.įacebook has become accustomed to dealing with multiple massive privacy breaches in recent years, and data belonging to hundreds of millions of its users has been leaked or stolen by hackers.īut, instead of owning up to its latest failure to protect user data, Facebook is pulling from a familiar playbook: just like it did during the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, it’s attempting to reframe the security failure as merely a breach of its terms of service.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |