Genuinely curious....
But don't they sort of have a point to a certain extent? Bear with me here....
People do not think twice about posting personal information in the public domain. In which case, that information is fair game, right?
Back in my early innocent days, I had my email links lifted from my little, innocuous web site that are *still* doing the rounds. I made that info public and in a form that could be scraped. My fault entirely. That's from over 21 years ago!
So, data scraping by people with ulterior motives is something that happens all the time. Has been for years. This is the norm I'd say, like it not.
However, if its information that is marked as 'private' being held by another company - that's a little bit murkier. If that gets leaked from a company site that claims to protect it, then indeed this type of event should NOT be normalized. People will be using that site in the belief that the data is safe, both from internal and external scraping.
So, when "miscreants helped themselves to 70GB of names, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, and more from people's Facebook profiles, thanks to a security weakness in the platform" - this is something NOT to be normalized. The data was scraped due to a security weakness, not an individual's desire to share information.
But here is the sting in the tail....."that they will frame the recent 533 million data leak as a ‘broad industry issue’ and that they want to normalize this".
To me it seems to suggest that FB believe that, in general, sites that claim to hold data securely are actually not that secure at all, and that is the 'normal' state of things. The sad thing is, given the number of data breaches that get reported, FB may actually have a point.
I am interested to hear what others think.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
