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.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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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)
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Yeah that was just a cost of business. Zuck probably pulled that from under his couch.
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.
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.
Why would the regime ever hurt itself tho?
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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.
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
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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
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...
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.
And you can imagine someone thinking it's super clever and secure.
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.
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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.
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Jesus, why not fine them 5 bucks?
What a joke.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Password hashing has been standard practice far longer than Facebook has existed. Even by 2004's awful, 'archaic' standards.
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And these are the people who demand id to get back into your account if they find activity they deem suspicious.
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17 cents apiece
Something like this should be like 15% of last year's revenue.
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