
Facebook’s response to Saturday’s news of a huge data leak was so awful.
Monday was already forming up to be an exciting news day for tech journalists.
That's when the next episode of Sway, the podcast from The New York Times’ Kara Swisher, will be available to listen to, with the new interview subject being none other than Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Kara Swisher on Friday kidded via Twitter
that the conversation with Cook will cover everything from the App Store drama
around Parler to the iPhone maker’s feud with Facebook — the end of which,
on Saturday, accidentally handed Cook even more ammunition to use against the
social networking giant as he continues making his case that Facebook is awful.
In case you haven’t heard by now, there’s been another huge Facebook data leak,
encompassing personal information from more than 533 million Facebook users
from 106 countries. This data was posted in a hacking forum, according to a
report from Insider, which is to say — if you have a Facebook account, there’s
a good chance your data has once again been exposed to hackers including
everything from your phone number to your email address, birthday, full name,
and more.
One of the big dangers with a leak
like this is that hackers and other malicious actors can use this information
to try to access your Facebook account, and frankly any other accounts, now
that they have an abundance of information about you. They can try to reset
your password, for example, and use that to cause all sorts of another
mischief.
On Twitter, the Facebook spokesperson
Liz Bourgeois responded to a handful of news articles and posts about this leak
by tweeting the same two-sentence statement: “This is old data that was
previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
In other words, Facebook is
responsible for a few hundred million users having their data leaked yet again
(seriously, how many times is this now?), but don’t worry, it’s fine — they
fixed the problem a long time ago. Not that this does anything to help un-leak
the data that’s now in hackers' hands, but, hey, Facebook did its part!
Naturally, many people have found that response to be monumentally unsatisfactory.
• “Fixed it
how?” someone tweeted in response. “The data is still out there.”
•“How do I
change my date of birth?” reads another response.
•Also, “I’ve
had the same email for a decade. Love this dismissive response.”
•And: “You’re
head of Communications for @Facebook and this is your response!? How about
“we’re deeply sorry for your data being exposed for a second time. Please
contact our CS team and we’ll help you restore and protect your account.” Just
try harder!”
Needless to say, this is all going
to help shine an even bigger light on anything Cook says about Facebook during
what promises to be a long and in-depth interview with Swisher on Monday. Here
are some of the Facebook-related comments from Cook that Swisher has already
shared from the upcoming interview:
“All we’re doing, Kara, is giving
the user the choice whether to be tracked or not,” Cook says at one point
during the podcast, a reference to the iOS changes that will make it harder for
Facebook to hoover up data about what its users are doing around the web. “And
I think it’s hard to argue against that. I’ve been — I’ve been shocked that
there’s been pushback on this to this degree.”
And then, when Swisher goes on to ask him how he thinks this might impact Facebook’s bottom line, the Apple CEO lowers the noise. “Yeah, Kara, I’m not focused on Facebook. So I don’t know.”
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