'Breaches'
"Move along please. Nothing to see here." That sums up the response of Facebook and LinkedIn after it emerged details about more than a billion of their users were available online. The Irish data protection regulator is not convinced and says it believes "one or more provisions of the GDPR and/or the Data Protection Act 2018 may have been, and/or are being, infringed in relation to Facebook Users’ personal data". It has launched an inquiry into how the Facebook data appeared, something the company blamed on a flaw in a tool for synching contacts which allowed details to be harvested en masse. And today, a digital rights group said it would sue Facebook over the incident.
For its part, LinkedIn also denied any data had been stolen, saying the details posted last week included "publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn". "This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review," it added. This will doubtless be of enormous comfort to the hundreds of thousands of users who have been receiving a rich assortment of phishing emails and scams. Bitdefender says, although the increase in LinkedIn-themed spam "can’t be directly associated with the leaked information, the overwhelming number of deceptive and fraudulent emails suggests otherwise".
One other item of Facebook news. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg was paid $23.4 million for security at home and when travelling. A financial disclosure statement also revealed that Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, received $7.6 million in security-related payments. Facebook says an "overall security program" has been authorised for the two executives "to address safety concerns due to specific threats to their safety". To be fair to Zuckerberg, he doesn't receive a salary (other than a notional $1 payment) or stock options. But then he does own millions of shares, giving him 57.7% of voting power and complete control of the company.