Greg's Corner

Another day, another Facebook leak. 50m users this time.

It must be a day ending in Y because once again, a security breach in Facebook has exposed the user information of some 50 million accounts. It was reported this past Friday, that there was a flaw in Facebook security that potentially could have led hackers to have access to these millions of accounts. What makes matters worse with this latest Facebook security breach is that the information could have led to the hijacking of other accounts outside of Facebook.

The information exposed is called an access token. Access tokens allow you to login to other services using your Facebook account. Facebook is so entrenched in our lives that our Facebook accounts now act as our logins to a multitude of other platforms including those not owned by Facebook. So potentially, not only could your Facebook account have been taken over but most of your online life could have been assumed if you’re that reliant on your Facebook login.

Facebook has said they have fixed the problem but once again this is Facebook closing the barn door after the horses have already gotten out. The data breaches are becoming so prevalent that we’ve just accepted them as inevitable. Is this really the platform we want to be trusting with our personal information? We share so much on Facebook that even without access bad actors could determine so much about us that they could use to our advantage. With Facebook leaking our information on top of that it shows that we’ve clearly given up on security for convenience.