Manila Bulletin

You can’t trust Facebook

- By ROM FERIA

Facebook, again, reveals that around 90 million user accounts have been breached. If the Cambridge Analytica incident is to be used as benchmark, I am sure that the 90 million figure will increase in a couple of days.

Anyway, the attacker exploited a series of bugs/vulnerabil­ities in the “View As” feature, a feature that allowed users to see what their profile looks like when viewed as other users. The breach allowed attacker to hijack login tokens and access your accounts as if they’re you. The breach was discovered last Tuesday, but the vulnerabil­ities have been there for several months already—so it is unknown what personal informatio­n the attackers were able to collect, until Facebook discovered it.

If you noticed that Facebook, or any applicatio­n that you linked to your Facebook login, logged you out automatica­lly on Friday, 28th September, then your account is one of the 90 million accounts that were compromise­d.

The above tweet reassures you that WhatsApp is not affected, but all other things might be—but for sure your Facebook, Oculus and Instagram accounts are affected. All those personal data—compromise­d.

As of writing, the identity of the attacker(s) is unknown. Nobody knows if the well-known Taiwanese bug bounty hunter’s press release of deleting Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page is connected to this vulnerabil­ity (he has backtracke­d and said that he will no longer do it).

“We have a responsibi­lity to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you”—Mark Zuckerberg right after the Cambridge Analytica incident

With multiple incidents showing how Facebook does not really care about the security of your personal data, coupled with how they continuous­ly violates your trust (for example: enable 2-Factor Authentica­tion for security, but using your mobile number for their ad network , and not to forget how they aid in spreading hate, you really cannot trust Facebook to care for its users.They only care about revenue, disguised as connecting the world. It is time to delete your account—your Facebook account, Instagram account, WhatsApp account, even your Oculus account—and stop feeding Facebook with your data, Facebook does not deserve to serve you!

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