Not sure why people are so hung up on the "breach" vs "not a breach" debate. The issue is this: taking a random personality quiz online is old news. We've been doing these since the 90s. The problem is that when you log in with FB, your real name, and all of your metadata is attached to that quiz.
It's not just "IP 12.342.32.1 is chaotic neutral" but "'Bob Smith, with a degree in X from Y, that likes A, B, and C and is newlywed' is chaotic neutral." The issue isn't really the quiz (and it's not even CA tbh), it's Facebook giving out real names, real pictures, etc. every time you "Log in with Facebook" on any random website or app.
If it was just this, I would be okay with it. It was also saying "and here is a list of all of Bob Smith's friends, and their info".
I have my Facebook profile set to 'friends', and perhaps its obvious now, but I guess I didn't realize an app installed by my great aunt now has all my information. I happily gave her access to see my profile, kids pictures, etc. But do I want every single thing she connects to to see any data I allow her to see?
Yes. If you're curious what the present-day FB settings are that control this sort of information sharing, see here: https://i.imgur.com/6fyLx18.png
It's located in the user's "Apps" settings [1] under the section, "Apps Others Use: People who can see your info can bring it with them when they use apps. Use this setting to control the categories of information people can bring with them."
Yes, it really went that deep. But only if you pinky swore to only use that data to improve your app and then delete it! Facebook changed their API in 2014 and removed that ability, allowing companies to only see the profiles of friends that already had the same app (which the developer already had access to anyway). They claimed it was for user privacy, but really they realized they were giving away the crown jewels and allowing other companies to recreate large swaths of their social graph.
Getting the discussion to "breach/not breach" is taking the discussion away from the actual point. Facebook is a cancer for privacy. The affiliates of Facebook are a cancer for privacy. Privacy is a human right. Facebook is cancer (imho).
That said, I believe FB would LOVE if we change the topic from PRIVACY to "anything-except-privacy".
And yes. Any/all dictators (of any shape or form) are trying to silence the media/journalists. Why would FB practice a different method?
This way they want to make sure that the next whistleblower won't have an outlet.
I agree with you about being very cautious about how this debate gets framed. Big corporations are boss at framing the debate in such a way that the results don't matter. Be very aware of this tendency.
But this is how these sorts of OAuth schemes have always worked. It's always been explicit, too. You grant these apps access to this information. What exactly is the issue here? That this time it was used in a way people don't like? There's a reasonable debate to be had about how to deal with all this data, but to blame Facebook as if they made some error or leaked some data in an unauthorized way, or did anything that we didn't all know was possible this whole time is just totally disingenuous on the part of journalists and regulators.
The thing that seems really wrong here is that you weren't just granting access to your own information, but all of your friends as well, who had little say in the matter beyond their original grants of permission to Facebook.
It is this way that Cambridge Analytica was able to get 50 million profiles by just paying ~270k Amazon mechanical turkers [1].
It's true that everyone agreed to everything along the way: people allowed Facebook to have the information in question, and people allowed Cambridge Analytica to access that information. But it wasn't the same people agreeing to both. The set of people agreeing to the latter was much smaller than the former.
It may be true that technically neither Facebook nor Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong (at least in collecting this information, this seems to be by far the least shady part of CA's business), but, Facebook's business is built on trust, and this is a huge hit to that trust. Arguing technicalities doesn't help.
> The thing that seems really wrong here is that you weren't just granting access to your own information, but all of your friends as well, who had little say in the matter beyond their original grants of permission to Facebook.
Except that those users had granted that permission to the people who then granted it to CA. So, transitively (which is the only way to think about permissions), they had granted it to CA.
Not really.
You granted permission for your friends to access the information. You did not give your friends permission to grant permission in accessing your information or share it directly.
Now Facebook may make a different statement etc and the rules of service, privacy can allow for this. But it is not a property that is transitive in general. And it is bad publicity. (I hope.)
I can be told a secret, I do not necessarily have the permission to share, for instance, what happened in the bachelor party last Saturday right?
No, this is not how OAuth works - OAuth itself is just a protocol to receive authorization from another server [1]. In this case, a third party relies on Facebook to say "This user has logged into Facebook and their ID is foo". OAuth _does not need_ social information or anything else.
Of course, you can allow the authorization server to publish these details, but this is not an inherent part of OAuth. Also, there's OpenID Connect [2] which builds on OAuth and adds just this information in another token: "The ID token resembles the concept of an identity card, in a standard JWT format." (from [2]). However, you can happily use OAuth without ever publishing the user's details.
I took your comment to say "You have to allow access to your data if you're using OAuth, because that's how OAuth works", and wanted to argue against that. The OAuth protocol is so complicated because it tries to be safe and secure and so it doesn't force any data disclosure.
However, I now see that you probably meant "OAuth forces you to accept these permissions explicitely". In that case, we're hopefully both right :)
We (the general public) grant permission for facebook to use our data, with the expectation that they don't let any bad actors do anything with it that harms us (the general public). This has been their image, this is what they espouse, and it is clearly not what happened.
>anything that we didn't all know was possible this whole time
I believe the reason this story is blowing up so big in the media is because most people never imagined their data being used in this way. When I login to patreon and subscribe to someone, I know exactly what I am paying. When I login to facebook and make a post, I (the average user) have no idea what it is that I am paying and/or how it can be used. I give away some factoid about myself without realizing that my angry post about Trump actually tweaks some political vector that is being calculated on me.
Consent is not enough, informed consent is the bar we have to set and it's basically impossible to say that the average facebook user is properly informed of what data they're giving, how it's being used and how much it is worth in dollar terms. Can you imagine if I could log into Facebook and see the models they've generated based on my content, and the dollar amount they've collected for that information so far. That's informed consent and somehow I doubt Facebook would be quite as profitable if people knew the actual cost they're paying.
I believe that you, a person with a strong interest technology, believe the consequences are (and perhaps always were) obvious.
But I disagree that if we went back in time and quizzed people clicking "yes" that the majority would really understand that recent events were the probable expected outcome of them clicking "yes".
There's a difference between consent and informed consent. And it was strongly in the interests of Facebook (and anybody who made an app using their APIs) to be very vague about the potential consequences.
It doesn't help that anytime Facebook changes their privacy policy or their available privacy settings, they tend to set it to a convenient default that benefits them, and that Plumber Joe is likely to never even know about.
"anything that we didn't all know was possible this whole time"
Actually, there are lots of people who have no clue that such things are possible. Maybe in 20 or 30 years, everyone would become savvy enough to understand the implications of giving away their personal info freely, but we are not yet there. The people who know (younger, tech savvy etc) are in the minority. Today a big chunk of the population simply believes everything they read on FB, that is why trolling works so wonderfully
Well, fwiw, these quizzes weren't even on a separate website where you need to login using OAuth, but they were part of Facebook's "apps" ecosystem. And they were popular, so everyone was doing it, however harmful (and as has been said, even if you're not doing it, if your friend is doing it, the app can also see your information as your friend's connection). Add to that the tragic permission scheme where Facebook does say "This app can see this information..." without offering an option to allow/deny sharing of some things (I think they've changed it so you can give granular permissions).
Granular permissions are also a pain point for me on Android phones. They were possible with apps on BlackBerry phones in the late 200x's, but on Androids before version 5 or 6? No, it's either give the app permission for all of requested functionality, or don't install it...
Additionally, I think the public is now realizing how powerful the friend/follow metadata graph is. It's pretty easy/robust to infer traits about people for whom you don't have explicit information. Alan, Betty, and Charlotte filled out the quiz and all live in Florida; Dave has mutual friendships with Alan, Betty, and Charlotte; Dave probably lives in Florida. You can do this recursively and don't need to have concrete information about the majority of members in a graph in order to make pretty strong probablistic inferences about the traits of a large graph.
I believe it’s a legal point: In case of a breach, Facebook would have been required to disclose it to the affected users. They are pushing hard against the term because it might end up determining their liability.
This thread seems to think the technical implementation is at fault.
I'd offer an alternative: the fact that we're stuck "sharing" via centrally managed platforms is the real issue.
I don't care about Facebook auth mechanism. Regardless of how it shares data, FB still HAS all the data, and can find a different way to share that with whatever party they want.
There's no leverage in the information economy outside "Use the one or maybe 2 ISPs you have, and these handful of "top" providers online."
It's like having a meat space economy be controlled by a top-down authority, and you can only trade along it's finan... distribution network.
Oh wow, what a shock. We remade cyberspace society to be just as centrally controlled as meatspace society. While meatspace became more constrained in an authoritarian way yet again in human history.
Human society exists in a strange loop of "build walls that are used to oppress me."
Is there anyone in advertising who wouldn't want this? I honestly don't see why this is a problem. Many people don't care about what gets shared but do care about the benefits it brings to their user experience.
It's not just "IP 12.342.32.1 is chaotic neutral" but "'Bob Smith, with a degree in X from Y, that likes A, B, and C and is newlywed' is chaotic neutral." The issue isn't really the quiz (and it's not even CA tbh), it's Facebook giving out real names, real pictures, etc. every time you "Log in with Facebook" on any random website or app.