This website[1] seems to be entirely blank aside from this article, the claims made are dubious at best and essentially unsourced, and the alleged "breaches" discussed seem to all just be dumps of easily scrapable data or things third-party developers (not FB) left lying around. There's zero evidence whatsoever of actual breaches of FB servers here, which would be a major story covered by far more reputable sources were it true.
As far as I can best see, this is trying to sell people on VPN services for which the author gets a commission, given the embedded link to a "best VPNs" site...
I get the distinct impression that US companies largely face no consequences for data breaches and when they do it's fines that equate to less than a percent of their annual profits. Unless something changes there is very little incentive to start taking this stuff seriously.
I'm pretty sure that's - unfortunately - true for a lot of backends and not a Japanese phenomena.
Data breaches are not even the main concern. The main concern is, how FB itself acts with your data in its pockets. Do not trust the a millimeter far.
It could be improved, like the user having the real ownership of all personal data and with confirmation to where, to whom and when delivering it.
But, for real, will those changes please their investors?
My response:
Data breaches are a secondary concern. Facebook has too much data for anyone to exfiltrate a large percentage of it.
The primary bad actor is Facebook itself, which can analyze and operate on all of that data (to share with governments, partners, or psychological experiments).
That's the point of my comment. The article asks if Facebook has become unsafe because of hackers. I was arguing that Facebook has been unsafe for a long time because of Facebook, rendering the article somewhat beside the point.
Asking if Facebook is unsafe because of hackers is like asking if a vial of arsenic might be contaminated with cyanide. Yes, it may be contaminated, but it was already guaranteed to kill you.
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
To answer the original question though, no Facebook isn’t safe and never was. Delete your account. I did four years ago and I’ve never missed it.
While reasonable people can disagree on this point, it seems a valid point of view that once you've publicly posted something that's part of an online conversation you can no longer unilaterally delete it.
But once you delete your account those posts can be attributed to “Deleted User”. HN doesn’t even do that.
If these pieces of data are used for authentication for some other service (cough healthcare), that is a flaw elsewhere - not with Facebook.
If we are gonna be upset about this we should still be upset about Equifax, which we totally forgot, didn’t we?
I’m now under the assumption that some kind of data breach of mine is inevitable. It’s not worth stressing out about in a lot of ways.
By any reasonable definition Equifax got away with it Scot free. No one is expending any energy getting angry about it because it has been repeatedly demonstrated that regulators don’t care about data breaches so what can you do?
No company is going to care about this until C-suites and boards start going to jail.
