Facebook, ever again, shows that it prefers to learn on its own mistakes rather than someone else’s. This time, it’s about storing passwords in plain text: a textbook security negligence, at different times stepped on by Equifax, Adobe, and Sony.
And this really doesn’t help in building confidence in the social network. We entrust them our most personal pieces of information, and they don’t give a damn about keeping it safe.
“We have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them.”, said Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, security, and privacy. Given all the recent breaches in this company’s security, I can’t help translating this to human language as “we didn’t bother so we didn’t put any access control audit mechanisms in place, so whoever saw your passwords, there is no (and can’t be) any real evidence to that.”
Just a couple of days ago I was asked to send money via Facebook payment service. In the middle of the payment process I realized it is not possible to make the payment – which would have been a one-off one for me – without having Facebook remember either my card or Paypal details. I stopped, closed the Facebook tab, and paid with a different method. Glad I did.
Picture credit: Alex E. Proimos