The only difference is that instead of the baddies having to sneak in carefully at night to nick stuff, Facebook said 'welcome, come on in, help yourself – here's a sack'.
The end result – millions of people having their personal data used against them without their knowledge or consent - is the same.
To me, calling it a breach is Facebook's attempt at passing the buck. Getting breached alleviates some responsibility for what happened. Maybe not in reality, but in how it's portrayed in the media and how it's understood by laymen it absolutely does.
> ”Breach" specifically implies that defenses were penetrated
It’s time to update the definition. “Breach” means you lost my shit. I thought I gave it you in confidence and then you lost it. Facebook arguing “this isn’t technically a breach” comes across as their yet again talking down to users to slip problems under the rug.
Sure, but we still need some term to disambiguate between "a company didn't protect my data against intruders" and "a company sold my data, then didn't like what the buyer did with it".
This isn't like the Equifax breach. It's not a result of Facebook's security practices. It's a result of Facebook's entire business model.
This can be a 'breach' by many of these definitions.[0][1][2]
You're basically saying, "Words only mean the things that I want them to mean, and if you try to use them a different way than I approve, then I will use this meme to try to shut you down."
Words fluctuate in meaning all the time. This may very well be the beginning of a new definition for breach, i.e., a social data breach, for example.
But we don't even have to go so far as to claim that this is a new meaning for breach. Any of these old definitions contains sufficient meaningfulness to make "Facebook loses control of data to unauthorized breach" perfectly intelligble.
> Any of these old definitions contains sufficient meaningfulness to make "Facebook loses control of data to unauthorized breach" perfectly intelligble.
Sure, but the point being made by the "it's not a breach" people is that Facebook didn't lose control of data to an unauthorized breach. They gave up data according to their own documented and expected procedures to people who were supposed to have it. "Facebook voluntarily and purposefully gives away data in an authorized breach" is not so intelligible.
The fact that "Facebook loses control of data to unauthorized breach" would be a sensible, understandable sentence isn't really relevant when nothing of the kind has happened. Who'd be using that sentence?
I guess then I'm confused about the narrative of the story so far.
Did Facebook have control over its (my? your?) data at Cambridge Analytica or not? I thought the extra 50 to 250 million profiles scraped were unauthorized access?
> "Words only mean the things that I want them to mean, and if you try to use them a different way than I approve, then I will use this meme to try to shut you down."
checkyoursudo, I don't want to shut anybody down. I get your point.
And I am sure that in a world of haveibeenpwned.com and Equifax you get mine.
Let's focus on the real issue here. Facebook has data that:
- Can harm everyone
- Is not protecting it well enough
The only difference is that instead of the baddies having to sneak in carefully at night to nick stuff, Facebook said 'welcome, come on in, help yourself – here's a sack'.
The end result – millions of people having their personal data used against them without their knowledge or consent - is the same.