
Facebook Has Hosted Stolen Identities and Social Security Numbers for Years - rbanffy
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgjme/facebook-hosted-stolen-identities-and-social-security-numbers
======
thrusong
Back when they first introduced Pages, around 2008 I think, you had to upload
a scan or photo of your driver's license to prove your real identity (I was 19
and naive).

Well, a few months later, I go and look at my page which I never really used,
and found my driver's license picture sitting in a public album on the page. I
deleted it immediately.

Back then, you could directly email the company. I received a response a short
time later that they had patched the bug and thanked me for bringing it to
their attention.

I should have that email somewhere. It seemed like a pretty substantial glitch
but I didn't do anything about it at the time.

~~~
rhizome
Yeah, but the person who implemented it sure could big-O the shit out of a
b-tree.

~~~
gcatalfamo
Your comment and parent should be emailed to every single person working in
tech. Every morning.

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pooooooowq
Very loosely, back in the 1990s, centralized mass media was seen as stifling
original thinking, forcing people to conform to whatever dimwitted thing the
TV fed to them.

Then in the 2000s comes social media. We can find people online who we
actually like hanging out with. Like-minded people didn't have to live
isolated from each other. You could be whomever you wanted to be -- identity
was seen as virtual, easily-changeable -- and this was seen as good.

Nowadays, the very same centralized mass media are demonizing being able to
more easily choose your friends. They portray "like-minded people" gathering
online as some kind of criminal or terrorist activity that threatens to
destroy society in some not well explained way. Being able to express yourself
using different personas is now seen not as a creative endeavor, but the work
of shady operatives trying to stay hidden as they manipulate the already-
willing into doing things they already agree with.

Forgive my skepticism if you feel it's unwarranted, but all I see in this
article is a concerted effort by centralized mass media to regain its
influence over society, and what that gets us is what we had for most of the
20th century, and _that 's not good_.

~~~
tomc1985
Allowing like-minded people to find each other is not necessarily virtuous. A
group of people who congeal purely for like-mindedness get lost in groupthink
and the herd mentality.

~~~
nneonneo
I think there’s a lot of truth to this in today’s polarized environment. It is
easier than ever to pick and choose exactly which groups of people you want to
associate with - and equally easy to silence and ignore those with conflicting
views. In the olden days you had to tar and feather someone to get rid of them
- it’s simply no longer true in today’s social media society.

~~~
tomc1985
I think we humans like to think we are driven to connect solely by mutual
interests, but in reality our social dynamics are much more complex than that.
Reducing the abstraction of how people meet into a graph problem is the source
of much of our societal issues with social media and sociability in general.

And man, does tech sure like it's careless and simplified approaches. Every
day I am a little bit more convinced that we tech people are the only ones
convinced of our genius

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sp332
A different Krebs article is worth reading too.
[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-
abuse-...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-abuse-system-
broken/) FB ignored complaints made through their own abuse-reporting channels
but responded quickly after he started posting complaints on Twitter.

~~~
azernik
For an even more dramatic example, when Facebook posts were fueling anti-
Muslim pogroms in Sri Lanka, Facebook didn't respond to either reports in
their system or to direct outreach from the government, until about a week or
two into the violence the government blocked Facebook entirely. Then they
showed up and made a display of contrition and responsibility.

"""

On Facebook, Mr. Weerasinghe posted a video that showed him walking the shops
of a town called Digana, warning that too many were owned by Muslims, and
urging Sinhalese to take the town back. The researchers in Colombo reported
his video to Facebook, along with his earlier posts, but all remained online.

Over the next three days, mobs descended on several towns, burning mosques,
Muslim-owned shops and homes. One of those towns was Digana. And one of those
homes, among the storefronts of its winding central street, belonged to the
Basith family.

Abdul Basith, a 27-year-old aspiring journalist, was trapped inside.

“They have broken all the doors in our house, large stones are falling
inside,” Mr. Basith said in a call to his uncle as the attack began. “The
house is burning.”

The next morning, the police found his body.

In response, the government temporarily blocked most social media. Only then
did Facebook representatives get in touch with Sri Lankan officials, they say.
Mr. Weerasinghe’s page was closed the same day.

"""

~~~
megous
Don't worry, at least in Burma (country where a genocide is happening) it's
fixed now. /s For a country very roughly the population of Germany they now
have dozens of people policing content. In Germany they had 1200 before even
announcing they'd hire anyone for Burma. And that itself was because of
pressure from German government. They "care", but only about expanding
recklessly and doing absolute minimum to keep their market. It's prudent
corporate behavior.

[http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2017/Facebook-is-
adding-500-mor...](http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2017/Facebook-is-
adding-500-more-contractors-in-Germany-to-review-content-posted-to-the-social-
media-site-after-a-new-law-came-into-force-targeting-online-hate-
speech/id-e1ac98f540b44137a612d6c309744bd4)

~~~
azernik
In Burma the government isn't going to block Facebook to get it to intervene,
like Sri Lanka did. They're _running_ the genocide, after all!

~~~
megous
More reason for FB to actually police their platform according to their own
rules there, and not let site policy violations slide.

~~~
azernik
'zactly.

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fenwick67
Funny how they redacted the query, but you can see many of the query words
bolded in the results.

This gets pretty close:

    
    
        site:http://facebook.com inurl:posts maiden "social security number" ssn phone 2018

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bertil
Challenging Safe Harbor would make starting any new platform a lot harder,
even operating a node of Diaspora, Mastodon, etc. legally very risky without
pre-approval. I’m not sure the recent posts promoting those technologies had
that in mind.

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roywiggins
It's stuff like this that may eventually convince Congress to defunitively
scale back safe-harbor (for good or ill). It's one think to say "we can self
regulate" but you have to, you know, self-regulate, otherwise eventually
regulations will be imposed on you.

On the one hand, I don't think noname blogs should be held responsible for
every single thing posted in their comments section. On the other hand, when
it comes to giants like Facebook, come on. Facebook obviously doesn't take
this stuff seriously and if they won't take stuff down like this without
public shaming, it seems clear that they just don't care.

~~~
jstarfish
> It's stuff like this that may eventually convince Congress

No, it absolutely _will_ convince Congress to scale back safe harbor. It's
already happening! It's how we ended up with SESTA/FOSTA on the books--
Backpage gave everyone the finger instead of policing itself.

4chan polices itself better than most of these commercial entities. It's a sad
state of affairs.

~~~
drb91
The difference is that SESTA/FOSTA has no discernible benefit to anyone but
congress, whereas actual regulation would presumably help consumers.

~~~
dragonwriter
You are more likely to get SESTA/FOSTA analogs with different predicate
offenses than “actual regulation”.

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phonebucket
This stuff should be taken down promptly by a platform, and then the
perpetrators tracked down where possible.

Isn't it thus beneficial to have a tangible platform that can be regulated
accordingly? That would make this an argument for a platform like Facebook,
not against it.

~~~
bertil
> then the perpetrators tracked down where possible.

Do you think that Facebook should have the right to arrest criminals? Under
which jurisdiction?

Imagine that Facebook is able to find commonalities between several posters,
do you think that law enforcement is responding appropriately?

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jstarfish
Facebook is a common data exfiltration platform as well. There are a lot of
CC# and SSNs stashed away in private messages.

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brudgers
Google makes it easy to find stolen identities and social security numbers
(and login credentials and API tokens and passwords and so on). Not just on
Facebook. Anywhere and everywhere across the entire internet. It's not like
there is a legitimate use for social security number searches (research aside
which could require an API key). Google isn't stopping it. It provides
tooling. It runs ads alongside the results. If Facebook is supposed to catch
and censor this stuff, then Google should be too. If Google gets a libertarian
pass, then perhaps so should Facebook.

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734786710934
"These weren’t very hard to find. It was as easy as a simple Google search."

