<story><title>250M Microsoft customer service and support records exposed on the web</title><url>https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/microsoft-customer-service-data-leak/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deepspace</author><text>I truly believe the era of privacy is over.&lt;p&gt;There are zero consequences to anyone important when a data breach happens; therefore there is no incentive for companies to protect their user data and the number of breaches will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.&lt;p&gt;By 2025 at the latest, there will effectively be no such thing as privacy anymore. All personal data belonging to everyone will have been exfiltrated and will be available for sale.&lt;p&gt;You will be able to purchase the full medical history, all financial transactions, all addresses, phone numbers, location history (often with photo&amp;#x2F;video evidence), all account numbers, ID numbers (government and otherwise), biometric data, browser&amp;#x2F;search history, every email, sms or chat message they ever sent or received and any other information you can think of for the vast majority of people on earth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josephg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been long arguing that there should be severe legal consequences for companies who leak data. Right now there&amp;#x27;s almost no legal repercussions for this sort of thing. I expect better from Microsoft, but I really don&amp;#x27;t expect any better from the thousands of tiny startups out there. Unless the people involved suffer any serious consequences for leaking their customer&amp;#x27;s data, they won&amp;#x27;t bother spending the time and money to do a good job and these breaches will continue to be commonplace.&lt;p&gt;As much as I love the free market, we&amp;#x27;re completely failing to protect consumers. I think we need the government to step in and align incentives. I don&amp;#x27;t know if we need engineers to be personally liable in the case of data breaches, but I&amp;#x27;m serious enough about this that I wouldn&amp;#x27;t take it off the table. Medicine has malpractice suits. Engineers have a professional duty of care. Builders have building codes. We need an equivalent for software engineering.&lt;p&gt;Its not the wild west anymore when we didn&amp;#x27;t know how to do this right. For almost all modern software, best practices are out there and well known. The way you secure a password database hasn&amp;#x27;t changed much in the last decade. Apparently people just don&amp;#x27;t care enough to learn and apply those techniques. Bootcamps don&amp;#x27;t even bother to teach any security practices. Given how much the world relies on our industry&amp;#x27;s ability and knowledge, that needs to change in a hurry.</text></comment>
<story><title>250M Microsoft customer service and support records exposed on the web</title><url>https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/microsoft-customer-service-data-leak/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deepspace</author><text>I truly believe the era of privacy is over.&lt;p&gt;There are zero consequences to anyone important when a data breach happens; therefore there is no incentive for companies to protect their user data and the number of breaches will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.&lt;p&gt;By 2025 at the latest, there will effectively be no such thing as privacy anymore. All personal data belonging to everyone will have been exfiltrated and will be available for sale.&lt;p&gt;You will be able to purchase the full medical history, all financial transactions, all addresses, phone numbers, location history (often with photo&amp;#x2F;video evidence), all account numbers, ID numbers (government and otherwise), biometric data, browser&amp;#x2F;search history, every email, sms or chat message they ever sent or received and any other information you can think of for the vast majority of people on earth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mathdev</author><text>I hope not. Much too late, I recently realised that I probably would not survive my WhatsApp history getting out.</text></comment>