TOBY SHAPSHAK: Facebook firmly in the dock, again
In the wake of the latest scandal there can be no excuses about whose fault it was that 50m users had their accounts hacked
This time Facebook can’t blame a third party for last week’s hacking of 50-million accounts, nor its seemingly scandalous use of cellphone details, logged as security backup, for marketing purposes. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook tried to paint itself as the victim of an outside party that said it would delete the user details but didn’t. Actually, the personality quiz app that scraped up all that data — from an estimated 87-million users — was just using the extraordinarily lax privacy controls that Facebook itself allowed. This time there can be no excuses. Facebook spotted last Tuesday that a hack was possible using its "view as" feature, which lets people view their profile as someone else would see it. It said 50-million people were directly affected and logged 90-million users out as a security measure: the other 40-million had used the feature since it was introduced in July 2017. "Security is an arms race," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later said — a ra...
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