Facebook’s response to this story is revealing:<p>> "We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations. The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people."<p>You get a similar argument in the recently leaked ‘Boz memo’: please ignore our unethical behavior, instead focus on how many users we have. Growth at any cost is justified.
On the one hand, this is a very shitty thing to do. On the other, he was young and dumb and FB was very different than it is today.<p>I suppose it could be red flag and indicate larger character flaws that have leaked into how FB operates now, but I'm personally glad I'm not being judged today for everything I did when I was 19.
Yeahh we need regulations on Facebook. The fact that he retains a majority voting share in the company, the fact that I now have zero trust in Zuckerberg AND Sandberg into doing the right thing, AND that there is no viable competition/users are too psychologically entwined to make the decision to detach from Facebook means the only checks and balances left against this unscrupulous individual is the US government. Unfortunately 80% are in his pockets, but that's the best bet we have.<p>What's stopping him from using his master access to obtain any info he needs for a presidential election? Trust? Trusting him?
I don't necessarily buy this story because the facts don't really add up and there is no real evidence that this occurred.<p>The source of the story is described to be one of Mark's friends "Here's how Mark described his hack to a friend" and not the journalists "We reached out to Tim McGinn and Elisabeth Theodore for comment. Both declined to comment.". Given the evidence is based on a verbal account to a friend there is a slim probability that Mark made the story up.<p>It also seems odd that the details of the hack are laid out so precisely. It is stated that he found the passwords to exactly two email accounts, one of which belonged to Tim McGinn given that "In one account he accessed, Mark saw an email from Crimson writer Tim McGinn to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya.". Mark looked for "members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson" but it would have been easier to find the specific people involved instead. And why use failed login attempts if you have access to actual user passwords. I can't think of any reason why you'd log failed passwords but not real ones (except for maliciously stealing passwords).<p>Finally, how did the email from Elisabeth Theodore to Tim McGinn become public given neither commented on the story. From other parts of the story, it seems likely that Tim McGinn was a source (who else would have known about Mark getting upset with Tim on the phone). So it seems that Tim gave the email to Business Insider however Business Insider does not explicitly state that. This suggests that neither they nor Tim have any real evidence that this "hacking" actually occurred.
Unrelated, but this reminded me of my very first real, salary developer job where I added logging to the web application. I remember logging failed password attempts specifically; I didn't give a second thought to simply logging the values of all form fields, seemed easiest at the time in case the developer changed the names of the fields.<p>It wasn't until a review by one of the senior devs that saw passwords in the log files - and with eyebrows raised asked "wth are you doing" - that it dawned on me, "oops". I'm glad that never made it out to production.
I'm not in defense of Zuckerberg, but I have seen and fortunately stopped some young entrepreneurs doing atrociously invasive things in order to better understand and expand their product.<p>I don't think this is necessarily a case of wickedness, but instead lack of knowledge and immaturity when the event happened.
Many comments here can be summarized "but he was only 19, young and dumb ..." However many 19 years olds do things that impact the rest of their life and don't get that excuse. "But doing illegal things is different..." Isn't accessing someone's email without consent illegal?
Ergo, a long history of double standards and hypocrisy.<p>Congresscritters on Tuesday are gonna set him on fire. Chances are that's all they do, unless setting him on fire brings about some actual political capital, and specific policies, to do something about facebook or privacy in general. But I think the critters have benefited from lax privacy laws, it's made them and their donor base wealthy and powerful, and a good deal of them will not want broad privacy protection for any number of reasons.<p>If their approval is around 10%, and Zuckerberg's is around 20% (estimates, but point being Zuck's is probably higher than Congress), they'll see making him look bad will at least in the short term make them look informed, sympathetic and serious. Even if they get a +1% for giving him a hard time, they'll see it as a win. It'll be a spectacle for fans of schadenfreude.
What I don't understand is how the important leaders and influencers of the world, like Obama, or Bill Gates, or others, are not ashamed to show themselves near Zuckerberg.<p>He started the whole Facebook with a theft from the Winklevoss brothers. That whole business is the fruit of theft. Yeah, he was young and stupid, but how many of you even considered doing such a thing to your employer? Yeah, he built a huge business based on it, but it's still built on thievery and deceivement.<p>No matter how many seemingly good things he does, he is still a thief (by my moral grounds, of course, not by law)
I’m getting a 404 on the article link now. Did someone (on a Sunday evening) notice that this story resurfaced on HN and had their lawyer send over a cease a desist to business insider to get it taken down?
Why are the media talking so much about Facebook's mistakes of 10 years ago, while there are much worse problems in privacy at the moment ? Grindr, China's rating system, NSA's algorithm in Pakistan..<p>Corporate culture changes a lot in 10 years, Facebook is the wrong target.