Facebook's latest security flaw is confusing

The latest Facebook security error is a complete shame.

Facebook knows it, and that is why the responsible man took a call with reporters on Friday to give the first uneven explanation of several bugs that have leaked information to 50 million people. Apparently Zuckerberg looked tired. He should have seemed hopeless.

The company waited until the news was filtered before revealing, at a second call, that the hacking was far worse than anyone thought. It is possible that the violation also affected the services where a person uses his Facebook identity to connect, such as Tinder, Spotify, and Airbnb. At this point, no one knows exactly how many data hackers have launched, although it is clear that they would have had full access to the victim profiles.

The attitude of the company is roughly equivalent to writing the emoji to shrug and the legend "sux 2 b u". During a phone conversation with reporters, Facebook did not voluntarily want his security breach to be perhaps much more serious than anyone thought. It took a question from Slate's reporter, Will Oremus, to talk about it.

Here is the relevant part of the transcript, highlighted:

We do not yet know many attacks at this point, but one thing is clear: it would not be unfair for Facebook to be wiped out by billions of dollars. The potential scope of this piracy is more serious than that of Cambridge Analytica.

Even though the hackers have miraculously stolen very little, the fact that it has never happened to a company in charge of the information of two billion people is astonishing. And it all depends on the company's early approach to growth and its seemingly limitless greed.

Facebook was too eager to own the web user's identity and should now pay the price.

Around 2010, we struggled for our collective online identity. Everyone knows that you can not try to remember the account names and passwords for every site you use online. One solution was to use a password manager or a trusted site like Google and Facebook to connect instead.

For example, here is a screenshot of the Spotify registration page. This shows how easy it is to connect with Facebook rather than filling out a long tedious form:

The tactic worked. According to Quartz, citing statistics from the Janrain Identity Company, Facebook has become by far the most popular connection choice.

The problem for the user was that he did not have to remember countless connections. The operation for a service such as Spotify was that users had a frictionless registration, which means faster growth. And, as always, Facebook needed more data, especially to know what its users were doing on websites other than Facebook.

Was it really worth giving Facebook all this data in exchange for an easier registration process? Especially since Facebook clearly can not trust the management of this information? Friday's news suggests no.

Security experts and journalists have been warning for years that giving Internet giants such access to our lives online is risky. This is how comedian Baratunde Thurston described it in Forbes. He wrote about Twitter, but the same thing could apply to any major technology company:

"Now, I need Twitter to connect to the Washington Post's comment section, where I express my anger at the latest conspiracy on the plot of Fox's Empire." I never used Twitter again, I would always be a Twitter user because the company looks like the school janitor with a big ring of keys juggling at various doors of my online life. "

Users should be outraged by the fact that Facebook, after having lobbied so hard for these flying keys, has massively benefited from their information while making a derisory effort to protect them. The company does not deserve the trust of billions of users and the only way to make changes is to go in droves.

Otherwise, we are all just "crazy idiots", as Zuckerberg, 19, once said.