This is like when Dr Evil asks for $1 million dollars after being unfrozen. These courts need to get with the times.
Should be like GDPR fines: 4% of your annual global revenue.
Edit: just read “It has so far fined Meta a total of 2.5 billion euros for breaches under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR), introduced in 2018, including a record 1.2 billion euro fine in 2023 that Meta is appealing”
Wow, Meta really likes donating to the EU
102 million is a major fine.
102 million is a major fine for you. For meta that’s less than 1% of their last quarter (which was 13 billion net income).
If you make $50k/yr after taxes, the equivalent fine would be on the order of about $120.
Where I’m from, that’s a speeding ticket.
Wow you have very forgiving traffic laws where you’re from. $190 for rolling through a stop sign here.
I’ve been told we have state senators who openly claim to only be there to keep speeding tickets low.
To put it into perspective, the fine was 0.8% of that net income.
It is absolutely not, but I understand it’s easy to lose sense of scale when you go into billions territory.
Not for a company with 120 Billion profits.
Meta: The company whose products you use when you absolutely, positively, don’t give a shit that they are the worst example of the worst nightmare of a consumer-hostile, privacy-invading, you-are-the-product, tech company. Yes, even worse than Microsoft.
If it’s free, you are the product.
Well now even when you pay you’re the product.
I haven’t paid for Lemmy yet. Well, other than volunteer time.
I guess if we want something where we’re not the product, we have to build it ourselves.
Even without any potential monetization by anyone… you kind of are? You are part of the community here, and that’s what people come here for. Lemmy’s community is the product it offers, and you are a piece of it.
I wish more people on Reddit and Twitter would recognize that and use more discretion with who they’re creating a product for.
What makes you so sure that the person hosting your instance isn’t monetizing it or trying to find a way to monetize it in the background?
Maybe they’re selling all these posts and DMs to OpenAI?
Lemmy.world is a registered non-profit organization. https://fedihosting.foundation/about-us/
It’s easy enough to use the API to scrape the site and use all the posts and DMs for free. It’d be odd for OpenAI to pay for it.
Please do recognize that anything you post publicly IS public, whether that’s Facebook or here. The lack of an API isn’t going to stop places from scraping your data off of Facebook or Reddit either.
Your DMs here are explicitly public. That’s part of the federation between servers. If you want truly private DMs, there are options for that.
I suppose I should mention for full disclosure that I’m part of the (unpaid) staff here representing the Lemmy.World Community Team.
Not that I DMd people, but I don’t think I knew that, so that’s good to know.
But also don’t mistake a not for profit as not being able to do something to aquire money to help pay for itself or the salaries of it’s people. They could absolutely be looking for ways to monetize this to a certain extent. A not for profit is not a charity.
I’d recommend Signal for truly private messaging. I’ve heard things about Matrix, and the warning mentions Element.io, nether of which I’m personally familiar with.
Oh, well that’s a great warning. Glad they put that there.
And ya I already use signal.
They don’t need to sell access… It’s free. Assume anything you post here is getting sniffed up by everyone.
This is why you never reuse passwords. Usually there’s no way to tell if a site is storing them in plain text until there’s a data breach.
Jesus, why not fine them 5 bucks?
What a joke.
They still store the passwords like that? I remember that quote of Zuckerberg doing so, in the early days, and boasting about it to a friend… This was so outrageous at the time. Now it’s beyond absurdity… Not to mention the fine is so small!
Not to excuse them, but this is from 2019. Yes, that behavior was so outrageous at the time, but hopefully it is no longer happening
Also, nobody reads the actual posts, just the headlines. They were accidentally stored in logs:
As part of a security review in 2019, we found that a subset of FB users’ passwords were temporarily logged in a readable format within our internal data systems,
which is something I’ve seen at other companies too. For example, if you have error logging that logs the entire HTTP request when an error happens, but forget to filter out sensitive fields.
I worked at a company that handled sensitive data and we always had to pay special attention to logs in code reviews to make sure someone wasn’t inadvertently logging something that could potentially be private.
There’s sometimes cases people don’t think of ahead of time. For example if you log stack traces, they may contain details about the arguments passed to functions.
I remember my bank used to ask me for the 2nd, 5th and 7th letters of my password from time to time.
There’s only one realistic way they can know those to ask me.
They haven’t asked me that for a while now, so I can only hope they encrypted them properly at some point.
I can only hope they encrypted them properly at some point
Encryption is reversible, hashing isn’t. That’s why you use the latter for passwords.
I once called my bank because I had trouble logging in. They didn’t outright say it but they implied that they could see my password and asked if I wanted to update it by telling them the new one. I said no.
And you can imagine someone thinking it’s super clever and secure.
2019 isn’t some ancient far away time though, it’s just a few years ago. If Facebook were doing stuff like this then, think who else is still doing it.
Probably is
I imagine the implementation would cost them more than the fine…
no… just… no.
I’m sure we can just trust that it’s better now. The small dent fee that falls under the category of "write-off’ on Meta’s budget probably really straightened up their behavior…
All fines should be percentage of income instead of some arbitrary number.
They also need to remove the limited liability from companies for intentional illegal activities.
illegal business practices should be charged to the people involved instead of the company. The executives who made the decision to break the law lose personal assets.
Otherwise the shitheads just pass the company losses onto the employees: no raises, hiring freezes, layoffs, reduction in benefits, etc…
100%. We need more personal liability for the evils of big business, not less
Intentional? Better use Negligent. It’s hard to prove intent; knowledge of something going on is much easier to prove.
And collected from shareholder payouts.
Why would the regime ever hurt itself tho?
Shoulda coulda woulda.
My aunt recently gave me a good advice, and a person in one chat with, I suspect, very interesting expertise gave the same advice in different form.
Emotions harm reason, and propaganda is not just directed at suppressing or increasing the emotion. It’s directed at making you emotional when you should be patient, and apathetic when you should be emotional, and act when you should wait, and wait when you should act.
It can easily work since everyone feels their fight of their day to be unique. But it’s not, and more than that - you can always look a few years back and remember that not only was it predicted, but you yourself predicted it.
By all this smartassery I meant - people making the laws don’t want them to work as we do, and they have sterilized the field. Think further.
Point being…?
Quick math: this is only 0.076% of their 2023’s revenue. No wonder big corporations don’t give a fuck about fines and will continue doing fucked up/illegal shit. This is not a fine, this is a green light, my friends.
They literally just consider fines as a cost of doing business.
Meta’s revenue is in the tens of billions. This fine isn’t even a rounding error for them. This isn’t something that should be taken so lightly.
Have you seen IT budgets? Some vice-president of technology is going to be pissed his numbers look bad compared to his peers during their weekly numbers measuring contest.
Its about $2.6 billion per week in revenue, even by the weekly numbers its not an impact
(based on ~$135b in revenue for 2023, according to financial disclosure reports)
😱
Yeah that was just a cost of business. Zuck probably pulled that from under his couch.
Considering how old Facebook is, you’d think they would have their shit together when it comes to password security…
I mentioned this in another comment too: Nobody seems to reads the actual posts, just the headlines. They were accidentally stored in logs:
As part of a security review in 2019, we found that a subset of FB users’ passwords were temporarily logged in a readable format within our internal data systems,
which is something I’ve seen at other companies too. For example, if you have error logging that logs the entire HTTP request when an error happens, but forget to filter out sensitive fields.
These things are the other way around. The older something is, the more likely it is to find a bunch of questionable choices, spaghetti code, and security holes.
The questions I have surround the “since 2012” bit. FB exists since 2004, so what happened in 2012? Was it a data dump, a careless logger, system migration, or something else?
Careless logging is the one.
Facebook is huge and has very diverse teams/departments. It’s absolutely possible the guys who know what security is, and the guys who build app xyz are in different departments, countries, continents.
The capitalists want us to believe otherwise, but large corporations are just as convoluted and inefficient as a planned economy.
Of not more. At least government gives some amount of insight and a chain of responsibility. Corporations are opaque and responsibility ends in an understaffed, underpaid “support” line.
Have you ever worked for government IT? Most of it is ages behind private sector.
I work in the private sector and our most essential systems run on Windows Server 2012. Because the installed applications can’t be migrated to anything else. After a reboot, there’s 21 scripts that need to be run in a specific order (with admin rights) to get the app running again. The frontend is an http webpage that’s open to the world.
The supplier of the software is a huge global corporation, market leader in their field.
I’m not saying there isn’t crap in the private sector, but in my experience government really sucks managing IT.
The difference is even this pittance of a fine wouldn’t happen in a planned economy - it would be like the planners fining themselves.
What we’re seeing here is a result of the amoral “beastly” types concentrating power. What you’re suggesting is to intentionally concentrate that power from the start.
Facebook is a great example of democracy - the billions of people using it have effectively (in their voluntary ignorance) voted for it to be like this. These are the same people who would vote for policies in a pure democracy.
And you’re ignoring what happens in the SMB space, where people aren’t part of the corrupt circle.
You’re welcome to start a small community anywhere in the US with a planned economy, as proof of concept.
You could call it… A commune, to indicate its goals.
Considering how old Facebook is…. They probably never bothered to upgrade the authentication system because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and it didn’t matter to their revenue.
At the time Facebook was invented, plaintext passwords had been a joke for years.
Password hashing has been standard practice far longer than Facebook has existed. Even by 2004’s awful, ‘archaic’ standards.
They are still on the old system of writing them down on paper XD
old system of writing them down on paper
That’s harder to steal/hack by someone across the globe.
It seems like it was one of those old systems from the earlier days that somehow was overlooked. It’s not great but I understand how it happens if they didn’t have strong monitoring and system ownership.
This is almost certainly the result of accidentally letting the passwords get into the logging infrastructure.
Something like this should be like 15% of last year’s revenue.
Glad I deleted mine in 2018 and use a password manager (KeepassDX). Only socials I have are Lemmy, Mastodon (rarely used), and Nostr. If it aint FOSS I avoid if at all possible.
Hold on, let me dig around for my surprised face
Whoa, better make sure all my pwds are in keepass! Didn’t know the fines were so hefty for that.
eehw, Facebook
