Would Be Cool if Everyone Normalized These Pesky Data Leaks, Says Data-Leaking Facebook in Leaked Memo

Facebook wants you to believe that the scraping of 533 million people's personal data from its platform, and the dumping of that data online by nefarious people, is something to be 'normalised.' The Register: A blundering Facebook public relations operative managed to send a journalist a copy of an internal document detailing the social network's strategy for containing the leaking of 533 million accounts -- and what the memo contained was infuriating though unsurprising. Belgian tech journalist Pieterjan van Leemputten asked the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company some questions about the theft and dumping online of account data earlier this month.

Miscreants had helped themselves to 70GB of names, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, and more from people's Facebook profiles, thanks to a security weakness in the platform. Having stolen the data in 2019, crims bought and sold it among themselves before one shared it via a Tor-hidden site in early April, inviting anyone to come and help themselves to it all. Yet when van Leemputten asked Facebook's mouthpieces to respond, what he got in return was quite unexpected. As he told The Register: 'Facebook accidentally sent me an internal email where they literally state that they will frame the recent 533 million data leak as a 'broad industry issue' and that they want to normalize this.' The memo added, 'To do this, the team is proposing a follow-up post in the next several weeks that talks more broadly about our anti-scraping work and provides more transparency around the amount of work we're doing in this area.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.