<story><title>Swedish Radio created fake pharmacy, reveals how Facebook stored sensitive data</title><url>https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/swedish-radio-created-fake-pharmacy-reveals-how-facebook-stored-sensitive-information</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FrenchDevRemote</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll bite too.&lt;p&gt;If you don&amp;#x27;t have superbowl ads money, or already have a huge following, data and A&amp;#x2F;B testing is probably the only way to be profitable while doing e-commerce on your own website&lt;p&gt;Those are tools designed to market products, not handle super sensitive data, it&amp;#x27;s kind of like using hotjar to record sessions on your (super confidential) website to find pain points and bugs, only to whine that hotjar stores data about your users actions, that&amp;#x27;s the entire reason why you&amp;#x27;re a customer.&lt;p&gt;I really don&amp;#x27;t get the fuss.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t even get the point of advertising pharmacies, you don&amp;#x27;t need medicines to be advertised to you, it&amp;#x27;s even crazier that a part of the price of your meds would be &amp;quot;facebook ads budget&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;And tbh I have more trust in the reliability of the infrastructure behind FB ads than in the spaghetti PHP code written in 2005 by a contractor for those pharmacies, or in the windows XP&amp;#x2F;vista computers that their employees use.&lt;p&gt;If I had to bet on who&amp;#x27;s getting hacked, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t bet on Facebook.</text></item><item><author>vanderZwan</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Whether it&amp;#x27;s nefarious is debatable&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ok, I&amp;#x27;ll bite: try to debate how it &lt;i&gt;isn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; nefarious, because I sincerely cannot think of an argument.</text></item><item><author>mekkkkkk</author><text>The reason is almost always to be able to do conversion tracking. I.e. to follow the trail from a specific ad campaign to a completed purchase in order to evaluate the campaign performance. There are of course ways to do this while preserving anonymity of the individual customers, but it&amp;#x27;s way too easy to mess up and&amp;#x2F;or give in to the allure of providing too much detail in the quest to further evaluate user behavior.&lt;p&gt;The tools are built to make it as easy as possible to provide as much data as possible about the users. Whether it&amp;#x27;s nefarious is debatable, but FB should definitely have some checks and balances on what they allow to be stored on their own platform.</text></item><item><author>andrelaszlo</author><text>Also by SR, in the last couple of weeks:&lt;p&gt;- The Swedish healthcare company Kry has built a service for digital patient calls that has leaked doctors &amp;#x27;and patients&amp;#x27; contact information to Facebook. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;health-service-marketed-as-secure-leaked-patient-information-to-facebook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;health-service-marketed-as-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- The state-owned pharmacy chain Apoteket has sent detailed information about its online customers and their purchases to Facebook, Swedish Radio News can reveal. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;pharmacy-passed-information-about-online-customers-to-facebook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;pharmacy-passed-information...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why the f** is everyone sending our data to FB by default? It&amp;#x27;s not enough to uninstall FB; you can&amp;#x27;t even go buy prescription medicine without them knowing, apparently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epicide</author><text>&amp;gt; And tbh I have more trust in the reliability of the infrastructure behind FB ads than in the spaghetti PHP code written in 2005 by a contractor for those pharmacies, or in the windows XP&amp;#x2F;vista computers that their employees use.&lt;p&gt;You are comparing &lt;i&gt;security&lt;/i&gt; in response to an issue about &lt;i&gt;privacy&lt;/i&gt;. Facebook&amp;#x27;s security around data that they shouldn&amp;#x27;t have in the first place is irrelevant.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, even a contractor today still &lt;i&gt;could not&lt;/i&gt; create feature parity with Facebook as they do not have the network effect of Facebook. That&amp;#x27;s assuming the company&amp;#x2F;contractor would even try to build all of it themselves.</text></comment>
<story><title>Swedish Radio created fake pharmacy, reveals how Facebook stored sensitive data</title><url>https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/swedish-radio-created-fake-pharmacy-reveals-how-facebook-stored-sensitive-information</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FrenchDevRemote</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll bite too.&lt;p&gt;If you don&amp;#x27;t have superbowl ads money, or already have a huge following, data and A&amp;#x2F;B testing is probably the only way to be profitable while doing e-commerce on your own website&lt;p&gt;Those are tools designed to market products, not handle super sensitive data, it&amp;#x27;s kind of like using hotjar to record sessions on your (super confidential) website to find pain points and bugs, only to whine that hotjar stores data about your users actions, that&amp;#x27;s the entire reason why you&amp;#x27;re a customer.&lt;p&gt;I really don&amp;#x27;t get the fuss.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t even get the point of advertising pharmacies, you don&amp;#x27;t need medicines to be advertised to you, it&amp;#x27;s even crazier that a part of the price of your meds would be &amp;quot;facebook ads budget&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;And tbh I have more trust in the reliability of the infrastructure behind FB ads than in the spaghetti PHP code written in 2005 by a contractor for those pharmacies, or in the windows XP&amp;#x2F;vista computers that their employees use.&lt;p&gt;If I had to bet on who&amp;#x27;s getting hacked, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t bet on Facebook.</text></item><item><author>vanderZwan</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Whether it&amp;#x27;s nefarious is debatable&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ok, I&amp;#x27;ll bite: try to debate how it &lt;i&gt;isn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; nefarious, because I sincerely cannot think of an argument.</text></item><item><author>mekkkkkk</author><text>The reason is almost always to be able to do conversion tracking. I.e. to follow the trail from a specific ad campaign to a completed purchase in order to evaluate the campaign performance. There are of course ways to do this while preserving anonymity of the individual customers, but it&amp;#x27;s way too easy to mess up and&amp;#x2F;or give in to the allure of providing too much detail in the quest to further evaluate user behavior.&lt;p&gt;The tools are built to make it as easy as possible to provide as much data as possible about the users. Whether it&amp;#x27;s nefarious is debatable, but FB should definitely have some checks and balances on what they allow to be stored on their own platform.</text></item><item><author>andrelaszlo</author><text>Also by SR, in the last couple of weeks:&lt;p&gt;- The Swedish healthcare company Kry has built a service for digital patient calls that has leaked doctors &amp;#x27;and patients&amp;#x27; contact information to Facebook. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;health-service-marketed-as-secure-leaked-patient-information-to-facebook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;health-service-marketed-as-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- The state-owned pharmacy chain Apoteket has sent detailed information about its online customers and their purchases to Facebook, Swedish Radio News can reveal. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;pharmacy-passed-information-about-online-customers-to-facebook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sverigesradio.se&amp;#x2F;artikel&amp;#x2F;pharmacy-passed-information...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why the f** is everyone sending our data to FB by default? It&amp;#x27;s not enough to uninstall FB; you can&amp;#x27;t even go buy prescription medicine without them knowing, apparently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vanderZwan</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Those are tools designed to market products, not handle super sensitive data, it&amp;#x27;s kind of like using hotjar to record sessions on your (super confidential) website to find pain points and bugs, only to whine that hotjar stores data about your users actions, that&amp;#x27;s the entire reason why you&amp;#x27;re a customer.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In which case it is nefarious to advertise that they do handle super sensitive data correctly. Which Facebook does.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;If I had to bet on who&amp;#x27;s getting hacked, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t bet on Facebook.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is moving the goalposts.</text></comment>