In fairness, that's pretty much a given for any web app.

Whatever user groups they create are only ever going to be an artificial construct - it's all just lists of stuff

Google 'could' open up all their gmail account's inboxes to an unrestricted public read-only rest api and shut down their normal email interface. They 'could' do this tomorrow. So everyone could see everyone else's email inbox.

Yahoo could do that and include even all the emails their users 'deleted'.

At one time, back in the 'olden days, everyone operated on the net as if this was a very real possibility.

Exactly.

I work for one of the large ecommerce tech companies - we have some great devs and run a pretty efficient cdci pipeline, stuff ships fast. There are multiple layers of unit testing, automated testing, manual testing and peer review in place to prevent this sort of thing.

Despite that, I can totally see how it wouldn't take much for a changeset in one area of the site that affected the default option in a drop-down in another to creep under the radar.

Well, my point being, we have an incredible degree of trust that these companies will operate in a continuous way, that their values will be unchanging. I too work at a large ecommerce tech company, and I can't see it suddenly changing. if you look at Yahoo, who knows in 10 years wether Verizon doesn't sell it off and the eventual owners decide that an ad-enabled 'look at everyone's emails' site wouldn't be worth the cost of buying Yahoo Mail's data.

Can E2E encryption not help? It works with WhatsApp or Signal groups, no?

But the app writer, os vendor or dev who wrote a library the app uses can defeat the e2e encryption because they are at the end.

The difference being, this needs malicious intent whereas accidentally configuring visibility defaults wrong or accidentally running `update foo set visibility='all'` are just a single small mistake.

Apple gets a lot of things wrong, but one thing it gets right is (mostly) designing things so that they couldn't get your data, even if they wanted to.

You mean like the iCloud thing where a bunch of famous women had home videos of themselves stolen?

Wasn't that more social engineering and password guessing though? Nothing they can do there apart from more security layers in the password/login but people will still not use string passes and be suspectible to social engineering.

After that they did exactly that, they included multi-factor authentication when it was previously unavailable. The MFA available in 2018 is dramatically better than it was in 2014, when I believe all that occurred.

Companies that don't protect unsophisticated users from simple mistakes or inaccurate mental models will get a reputation for being insecure and lose sales. This is regardless of whether the user "should have known better."

Their iCloud service was susceptible to brute force attacks.

That was caused by stupidity - reckless password management on the victim’s part.

Not really. Apple had no limit on the number of times that you could input a password incorrectly. They brute forced it. That's on Apple.

True, but I won’t put all the blame on Apple here. A good, random 30-char password would be impossible to crack even with thousands of attempts per second.

I wouldn't count on EU here. Public, state-owned EU broadcasters still naively and indefensibly maintain Facebook presences as the only way to get in touch. I mean, these are supposed to be press professionals, yet they still don't seem to understand the name of the game.

HN moderators can edit or remove this post I'm currently writing. What's your point?

You are anonymous here, and your post contains no personal information, and none of your real life friends and acquaintances will see any information you intended to keep private.

With facebook, you are not anonymous, many of your posts would contain private information, and many of them could be pushed to people you didn't want to share with.

I don't know what threat models you find compelling. But the damage HN could do to someone with the info they have from an account holder is an order or two of magnitude less than the damage facebook could do.

It all boils down to: you're storing data in someone else's database. At this point, technically, they could do whatever they want with it. All that stops them from doing so is their ethics, the law, and the desire to keep their business.

That's also the only thing that stops tens of thousands of people from walking into my house, murdering me and leaving with my possessions. It is working so far.

What kind of social network could exist where no one besides the author can modify the content or privacy settings of their posts? I'm guessing every user would have to self-host their own content?

I suppose a blockchain based social network could boast that feature.

HN mods can edit others' comments? Can someone else confirm this? I can't think of a valid use-case for this.

You are failing to see the point. Any website could theoretically do anything they wanted to their own website.

Reddit does not allow mods or admins to modify comments from the website UI, but that didn't stop the admin from modifying comments by editing the database directly.

> And possibly a big fine in Europe

You made me curious. For what exactly could Facebook be fined, and how much would that fine be?

This might fall under the GDPR, at which point they'd get between 2 and 4% of their annual turnover in fines.

No: Facebook can change the algo that picks the default setting of the visibility of your future posts.

Software changes are rather easy at Facebook (although that particular tool would surely have a ton of people monitoring it, including quantitative social scientists who don’t monitor a lot of pages). Changing the graph (stored information) is pretty much impossible without a lot of checks. That distinction is key to understand control at Facebook.

Facebook changed the visibility of the already-posted posts that had the bad default, without regard to user intent. All they did was decide to do it.

Sure they have internal controls so a rogue engineer can't do it. But if Facebook, as a company, decides it wants to mess with your settings, it can, and it does.

This event is an existence proof of that.

To reverse the visibility to private, you mean? I can’t start to imagine how they would do that, but “it took five days” points at a very kludgey hack.

The privacy setting on a given FB post is most likely a list of which "friend groups" within your account can see the post, and modifying that value in the database would change how the post appears. Whatever you choose is just a different parameter that gets stored on that post and can trivially be modified on FB's side in the future. FB could make every post you've ever made show up as public, and update your profile to be completely public as well. It's completely technically possible, though not too likely to happen.

Regarding the other point - the fact it took them 5 days to revert the privacy status on weeks' worth of posts of some ~14million users just points to them being thorough and _not_ doing it in a hacky manner. A hackish solution could have been done in an hour or two, most likely.

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I used to work there. Knowing how the information is stored and protected, I can’t imagine how one would do it.

> To reverse the visibility to private, you mean?

And also making private anything you legitimately wanted made public, because they couldn't tell the difference.

> UPDATE posts SET public = true;

584,203,510,091,521 records updated

I broke out in a cold sweat just reading that.

I think you were trying to distinguish 'Facebook' (the company / management at / powerful rogue agents in / whatever) and 'SWEs at Facebook', without actually calling them different things. Those are very different things, and your parent was rightly referring to the former.