It’s a little bit like what happened with Cambridge Analytica – the infamous Facebook app provider that offered so-called psychometric tests to seduce you into giving away a lot of detail about what made you tick, and then turned round and used that data in ways you almost certainly didn’t expect.
Ironically, even though these latest two data spillages, announced yesterday by leak-seeking cybersecurity company Upguard, aren’t quite as scary as the Cambridge Analytica story, they are in some ways even worse.
These breaches happened through plain old carelessness – databases hosted in the cloud and apparently almost casually left open to the world.
That’s like running your own servers in your own server room, but leaving the server room door unlocked with a big sign on it saying, “Free admission.
In fact, it’s like copying critical data from your own servers onto a whole boxful of unencrypted USB drives and walking round a Dark Web convention handing them out to all and sundry.
In other words, even though this isn’t “a Facebook breach”, because no one broke into Facebook itself, it is “a breach of Facebook data”, made possible by the enormous reach and influence that the Facebook platform enjoys.
At the time, many other companies were complaining that it would be too hard, too expensive, too slow and mostly pointless to encrypt everything, but Facebook proved them all wrong.
The reason for keeping tighter reign on app developers is that they have a privileged position in a rich and sprawling kingdom.