Who Else Reads Your Facebook Page?

From March 22, 2024 - Hey AT&T customers: Your Facebook data went to China and S. Korea this morning…

The author raises several questions:

• Should Facebook and or AT&T have notified their customers that their personal information was flowing over a network that they may not trust?
• Should Facebook enable SSL on all accounts by default?
• Was this actually a privacy breach or just the way the Internet functions?
• Does Facebook have an ethical responsibility to buy additional IP connectivity to major broadband and mobile networks to prevent routing mishaps?
• Is it time to focus on new options within BGP to prevent high profile sites from routing to non-authenticated networks?

This happens all the time — the Internet is just not a trusted network. Yet, I prefer to know that when I am on AT&T’s network, going to US located sites, my packets are not accidentally leaving the country and being subject to another nation’s policies. I guess that’s why you should not use Facebook in “bareback” mode and use HTTPS (SSL) any time you can.

The organizational power of technology tools like Facebook has been heavily utilized by those protesting across the Middle East the last few months. If a nation can reroute the AT&Ts network from the US, a nationally owned network can be rerouted too...

There are over 500 million Facebook users. It is the worlds largest community. Whether it was intentional or accidental that Facebook traffic was redirected to China, there is a lot to think about here.