Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text

All fines should be percentage of income instead of some arbitrary number.

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...
- Intentional? Better use Negligent. It's hard to prove intent; knowledge of something going on is much easier to prove.
- 100%. We need more personal liability for the evils of big business, not less
Why would the regime ever hurt itself tho?
And collected from shareholder payouts.
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.
- Point being...?

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.

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.
- 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)
- 😱
Yeah that was just a cost of business. Zuck probably pulled that from under his couch.

They literally just consider fines as a cost of doing business.

This is like when Dr Evil asks for $1 million dollars after being unfrozen. These courts need to get with the times.

Should be like GDPR fines: 4% of your annual global revenue.
Edit: just read "It has so far fined Meta a total of 2.5 billion euros for breaches under the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR), introduced in 2018, including a record 1.2 billion euro fine in 2023 that Meta is appealing"
Wow, Meta really likes donating to the EU
102 million is a major fine.
- 102 million is a major fine for you. For meta that's less than 1% of their last quarter (which was 13 billion net income).
- Not for a company with 120 Billion profits.
- It is absolutely not, but I understand it's easy to lose sense of scale when you go into billions territory.
- This is less than a rounding error.

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!

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
- 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.
- Also, nobody 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.
- 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.
- 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...
- Probably is

Jesus, why not fine them 5 bucks?

What a joke.

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.

If it's free, you are the product.
- Well now even when you pay you're the product.
- 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.
- 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.

And these are the people who demand id to get back into your account if they find activity they deem suspicious.

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.
- They tried to do the same to me on Instagram.
  Nope, it's not worth that level of privacy invasion.

Considering how old Facebook is, you'd think they would have their shit together when it comes to password security...

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.
- Of not more. At least government gives some amount of insight and a chain of responsibility. Corporations are opaque and responsibility ends in an understaffed, underpaid "support" line.
- Have you ever worked for government IT? Most of it is ages behind private sector.
- The difference is even this pittance of a fine wouldn't happen in a planned economy - it would be like the planners fining themselves.
  What we're seeing here is a result of the amoral "beastly" types concentrating power. What you're suggesting is to intentionally concentrate that power from the start.
  Facebook is a great example of democracy - the billions of people using it have effectively (in their voluntary ignorance) voted for it to be like this. These are the same people who would vote for policies in a pure democracy.
  And you're ignoring what happens in the SMB space, where people aren't part of the corrupt circle.
  You're welcome to start a small community anywhere in the US with a planned economy, as proof of concept.
  You could call it.... A commune, to indicate its goals.
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.
- Password hashing has been standard practice far longer than Facebook has existed. Even by 2004's awful, 'archaic' standards.
- At the time Facebook was invented, plaintext passwords had been a joke for years.
They are still on the old system of writing them down on paper XD
- old system of writing them down on paper
  That's harder to steal/hack by someone across the globe.
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.
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.
This is almost certainly the result of accidentally letting the passwords get into the logging infrastructure.
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.
The questions I have surround the "since 2012" bit. FB exists since 2004, so what happened in 2012? Was it a data dump, a careless logger, system migration, or something else?
- Careless logging is the one.

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.

17 cents apiece

I hope i dont get fined for

5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8

nah, sha-256 is fine, though you should pick something stronger than "password"
- Don't worry I don't use that for my internet bank: 19513FDC9DA4FB72A4A05EB66917548D3C90FF94D5419E1F2363EEA89DFEE1DD

That “m” should be a “b”. For a company that size, there is truly no excuse!

Glad I deleted mine in 2018 and use a password manager (KeepassDX). Only socials I have are Lemmy, Mastodon (rarely used), and Nostr. If it aint FOSS I avoid if at all possible.

Something like this should be like 15% of last year's revenue.

Hold on, let me dig around for my surprised face

Whoa, better make sure all my pwds are in keepass! Didn't know the fines were so hefty for that.

eehw, Facebook