Facebook breach

[x9200]

Zzm, have they done it purposely or as a result of some gross negligence?

[zzm9980]

Zzm, have they done it purposely or as a result of some gross negligence?

My finding? They were (And still are) doing it intentionally. They claim it is required in order to help facilitate locating users by sharing of contacts, or when you're not a user and continually get those emails which tell you someone on Facebook would like you to join.

Now, the ability for anyone to download arbitrary user's (or non-user's) contact info that Facebook had recorded for those purposes was negligence/a bug, and appears to have been fixed. Users also have the option to pro-actively remove their contact information from anyone who uses Facebook's data export feature in the future and may otherwise have had that info.

Example: Say I had your phone number in my address book, and uploaded it to Facebook to find more friends because I'm lonely. When I did a data export later, I would get your phone number back as it was something I gave to facebook and they stored in my account as it came from my contacts. You could on your privacy page mark your phone number as something no one should be able to export. If so, it would not be a apart of the data download.

[the lynx]

Why put phone number in Facebook in the first place?

[ecureilx]

Why put phone number in Facebook in the first place?

the point of having mobile # in Facebook (or yahoo or google) is it helps to reset the password in case you forgot it .. vs few years ago, when people lock out their account (or somebody logged in as you by mistake and locked it) you forget your account .. unlike now, you can get a OTP to reset on your mobile.

yah, perils of convenience ..

[zzm9980]

Why put phone number in Facebook in the first place?

Account security (SMS tokens), as a way of friends finding you, and incase you want your friends to just know it?

Keep in mind they assume their default audience wants to be open their friends.