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Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

The passwords in plaintext wasn't a breach or a leak. If you punish Facebook for it, they would be less inclined to share such information in the future.

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If we can't trust a company to audit themselves fairly (in fact, we can't generally) then they should bear the burden of paying for an external audit of their processes, many "boring" industries have these sorts of requirements.

That's how you handle children, though. No one is going to ignore wrongdoings in hopes the perp will continue to play nicely.

There might not have been a large-scale public data dump of passwords, but if 20,000[1] employees had access to logs with plaintext passwords, there is no guarantee I could ever accept that zero of them read or used customer passwords for personal purposes.

What's to stop a malicious ex-lover from grabbing a FB password and reading that person's private messages? If FB didn't even know there were passwords in plaintext, they very likely weren't auditing log access as much as was needed.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/21/18275837/facebook-plain-t...

Malicious insiders don't need your password to access your data. If you are concerned about malicious insiders then plaintext password logs don't matter.

With FB's dataset and employee count, it would be insane not to be concerned with malicious insiders. Even if you completely discount morality and honesty where Facebook is concerned (and I do), there's substantial liability risk, PR risk, regulatory risk and commercial paranoia, which I suspect was likely their biggest concern, at least until recently.

I'm more concerned with plaintext passwords because most people use the same passwords over and over, so if you can break one system, you can break others.

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