> Facebook told Gizmodo via email that in May 2016 it made a revision to the registration process, which originally asked the affected users for permission to upload contact lists. That change removed the opt-in prompt, though the company did not realize the underlying functionality was still operating in some cases.
It doesn't take a conspiracy to understand how a bug like that could happen.
At some point, it goes from "the occasional bug" to negligence at best, and hostility at worst.
"Mark Zuckerberg Promises That Misuse Of Facebook User Data Will Happen Again And Again" https://www.theonion.com/mark-zuckerberg-promises-that-misus...
"Facebook Employees Explain Daily Struggle Of Trying To Care About Company's Unethical Practices When Gig So Cushy" https://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-st...
"Cash-Strapped Zuckerberg Forced To Sell 11 Million Facebook Users" https://www.theonion.com/cash-strapped-zuckerberg-forced-to-...
"New Facebook Feature Allows User To Cancel Account. ... The company later confirmed that account closures would not stop Facebook from continuing to acquire, permanently store, and sell all information about its current and former users until the day they die." https://www.theonion.com/new-facebook-feature-allows-user-to...
When every public-facing thing you build is centered on hoovering up data, you're going to have two broad classes of errors. Hoovering up too little data, which doesn't hit the news, and hoovering up too much, which does.
That said, when your "errors" directly line your pockets, you're not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
That’s the initial asshole maneuver. There’s no excuse for Facebook to need that. Period.
2. CollectUserContacts(email, username, password);
It’s pretty hard for me to imagine that there’s some other function that just happens to coincide with accessing different email servers and collect past emails to collect the email addresses.
It was deliberate because of the work involved. The only investigators that think it’s accidental probably believe the internet is a small black box guarded by the “Internet wizards”.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
-- Upton Sinclair
> A Facebook spokesperson also told Gizmodo that a screenshot of the original opt-in prompt was not available.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist but if you're trying to claim you cannot capture a screenshot from any release meant to be shipped out, either you're crap at release management or are full of shit. Which one is it?
Also, even if we were to suspend logic and belive this was a bug, what's FB doing to correct it? Are they deleting all uploaded contacts and going to request for consent again?
FB is a cesspit. Get out of the company if you work there and get out of the platform in any case.
That doesn't strike me as especially unlikely, especially for a specific branch of the app codebase that would likely only operate with a huge number of other co-dependent codebases for backend systems that no longer exist.
With six months to recover code and build a non-live environment with all the dependencies could it be done? Sure. But that's not really within the scope of a journalist request.