The Facebook Problem

So, I think it's safe to say everyone reading this is sick of Facebook at this point. If you're reading this, you've probably made the jump to Mastodon or SpaceHey to get away from it. It feels anymore like most of the big social networks have become such toxic places, that using them isn't even enjoyable anymore. And of course there's the privacy aspect of things. Facebook has been so horrible with keeping their users' data safe and secure, that it's painful and even kind of horrifying to read when things happen. And we were all reminded of this the other day when the news broke that a data leak made all sorts of information available for any bad actor to see.

Now, no one is perfect, and everyone suffers data leaks now and then. It still doesn't change how serious the situation is, but unfortunately, it happens. What makes me mad is the fact that they don't seem to be owning up to the fact that it happened. All I have even heard from Facebook at this point is different variations of the same thing: "The data is old, and we patched the vulnerability in 2019." Okay, so maybe that's true. But it means nothing. Even if the vulnerability was patched in 2019, the data was still leaked now. Just because you patched it doesn't mean the problem goes away. And the whole "the data is old" thing is ridiculous to me. I mean, have you changed you email address in the past two years? How about your phone number? And you can't tell me you've changed your name or birthdate since then. And they're even saying this after the information of their CEO and other founders were leaked no less!

I think one of Facebook's major problems is that they just don't seem to care about what happens with their users' data. What a lot of people forget or don't even know is that privacy is a part of security, and if a service doesn't respect the privacy of your data, they don't respect the security of your data. And Facebook has shown time and time again they don't care about privacy.

This is post 21 of #100daystooffload