All fines should be percentage of income instead of some arbitrary number.
Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text
Submitted 12 hours ago by neme@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Emi@ani.social 12 hours ago
The_v@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
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…
yuki2501@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Intentional? Better use Negligent. It’s hard to prove intent; knowledge of something going on is much easier to prove.
Vespair@lemm.ee 9 hours ago
100%. We need more personal liability for the evils of big business, not less
Skymt@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
And collected from shareholder payouts.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
Point being…?
Teal@lemm.ee 5 hours ago
This is like when Dr Evil asks for $1 million dollars after being unfrozen. These courts need to get with the times.
WhatYouNeed@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Should be like GDPR fines: 4% of your annual global revenue.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
102 million is a major fine.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 4 hours ago
102 million is a major fine for you. For meta that’s less than 1% of their last quarter (which was around 13 billion net income).
InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Not for a company with 120 Billion profits.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
It is absolutely not, but I understand it’s easy to lose sense of scale when you go into billions territory.
Sundial@lemm.ee 12 hours ago
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.
Coasting0942@reddthat.com 11 hours ago
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.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
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)
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
😱
Fredselfish@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah that was just a cost of business. Zuck probably pulled that from under his couch.
octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
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.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
If it’s free, you are the product.
joshcodes@programming.dev 1 hour ago
This just doesn’t hold up in 2024. BMW charge you 60k for a vehicle and chuck a subscription on top. Apple, Google and Samsung charge between hundreds and thousands for their phones and advertise with their own agencies. Amazon forces paying customers to wade through bullshit products to finally buy the one they want, customers who bought prime and who didn’t.
Everyone is the product even if you pay. Stop saying this please.
Moah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
Well now even when you pay you’re the product.
Serinus@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
anzo@programming.dev 9 hours ago
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!
AA5B@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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
Blackmist@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
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.
dan@upvote.au 5 hours ago
Also, nobody reads the actual post. 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.
obinice@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
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…
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Jesus, why not fine them 5 bucks?
What a joke.
penquin@lemm.ee 10 hours ago
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.
irreticent@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
They literally just consider fines as a cost of doing business.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
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.
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
Considering how old Facebook is, you’d think they would have their shit together when it comes to password security…
leisesprecher@feddit.org 11 hours ago
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.
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Of not more. At least government gives some amount of insight and a chain of responsibility. Corporations are opaque.
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Have you ever worked for government IT? Most of it is ages behind private sector.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 10 hours ago
The difference is even this pjttance if a fine wouldn’t happen in a planned economy.
And you’re ignoring what happens in the SMB space.
ramble81@lemm.ee 11 hours ago
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.
frezik@midwest.social 4 hours ago
At the time Facebook was invented, plaintext passwords had been a joke for years.
dan@upvote.au 5 hours ago
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.
Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
They are still on the old system of writing them down on paper XD
FutileRecipe@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
old system of writing them down on paper
That’s harder to steal/hack by someone across the globe.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
frezik@midwest.social 4 hours ago
Careless logging is the one.
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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.
bolapara@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
This is almost certainly the result of accidentally letting the passwords get into the logging infrastructure.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Glad i deleted mine in 2018 and use a password manager (KeepassDX).
Yuki@kutsuya.dev 10 hours ago
Something like this should be like 15% of last year’s revenue.
bazingabot@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
eehw, Facebook
Cadeillac@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Hold on, let me dig around for my surprised face
pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
Whoa, better make sure all my pwds are in keepass! Didn’t know the fines were so hefty for that.
Laristal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 58 minutes ago
And these are the people who demand id to get back into your account if they find activity they deem suspicious.
jayandp@sh.itjust.works 4 minutes ago
Yep, had basically a throw away account for the occasional thing that basically required a Facebook account, and then I guess because I never posted anything they locked my account and demanded ID. Hell no.