Humans Do Not Cut and Paste 80 Million User Profiles and Draw Link Diagrams by Hand
May 9, 2018
As one who has always been cynical about online confidentiality, I’ve been a bit startled at the recent surprise surrounding Facebook’s privacy practices. Then again, perhaps we who follow information technology, and the ways companies leverage it, have more reason than most to be wary. The Register reports, “As Zuck Apologizes Again… Facebook Admits ‘Most’ of its 2bn+ Users May Have Had Public Profiles Slurped by Bots.” The disclosure appeared in Facebook’s own post announcing its new, post-Cambridge-Analytica-hullabaloo data policies. Writer Shaun Nichols explains:
“Even as the social network’s founder was giving his mea culpa for the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, however, another privacy scandal was emerging. Facebook’s outline of its new data policies included the disclosure that Facebook’s user search and account recovery features had been abused to scrape the profile information of potentially two or more billion accounts.
“‘Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them,’ Facebook explained. ‘However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way.’ Zuckerberg said the feature has been turned off effective immediately and, once again, apologized. ‘I would assume that if you had that setting turned on, someone at some point has access to your public info in this way,’ he admitted.”
Oh, goody. Nichols seems vexed that Zuckerberg issued a (perhaps legally advisable) caveat in the post—a reminder that, after all, Facebook users did choose to share the scraped information in a publicly accessible profile. Are companies like Facebook responsible for making their fine print more accessible and easy to understand? Or should users pay closer attention and take less for granted? Some of each, perhaps.
Cynthia Murrell, May 9, 2018
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