Reuters
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Facebook's latest security blunder is mind-blowingly serious, and it would not be unjust for the company to have many billions wiped off its value.
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Losing personal information of up to 50 million people is bad enough, but also risking people's accounts with sites like Tinder, Airbnb, or Spotify was an outrageous error.
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Like other tech giants, Facebook decided a while ago that having all your social-media information wasn't enough — it wanted to know what you were up to on other sites too.
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It showed last week it couldn't be trusted with that information, and users should leave in droves.
Facebook's latest security blunder is a disgrace.
Facebook knows it, which is why the man in charge took a call with reporters on Friday to give the first, patchy explanation of multiple bugs that exposed information of 50 million people. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg sounded tired. He should have sounded desperate.
The company waited for the news to filter out before revealing in a second call that, actually, the hack was much worse than anyone thought. It's possible that the breach also affected services for which people use Facebook to log in, such as Tinder, Spotify, and Airbnb. At this point, no one knows precisely how much data hackers took off with, though it's clear they would have had full access to victims' profiles.
The company's attitude is roughly equivalent to writing the shrug emoji and the caption "sux 2 b u." In a call with reporters, Facebook didn't willingly volunteer that its security breach might actually be much bigger than anyone thought; it took a question from the Slate journalist Will Oremus to tease that out.
Here's the relevant part of the transcript, highlighted:
There's a lot about the attack we don't know, but one thing is clear: It would not be unjust for Facebook to have many billions wiped off its value. The potential scale of this hack is more serious than that of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Even if the hackers miraculously stole very little, the fact it happened to a company entrusted with 2 billion people's information is astonishing. And it is all due to the company's early, hacky approach to growth and its apparently boundless greed.
This breach was due to a flaw in Facebook's code
Facebook explained that the hack was caused by multiple bugs in its code relating to a video-upload tool and Facebook's pro-privacy "View As" feature.
As Facebook explained it, the video uploader would appear erroneously whenever users were making use of the "View As" tool. The tool lets you see your Facebook profile from the perspective of another user. The uploader would then generate the access token for whoever's profile users were looking up. Simply put, this potentially gave hackers access to millions of Facebook profiles.