12 KiB
Corporate Sins
Bookmarks to articles about egregious crimes against humanity committed by corporations over the years.
Chick-fil-A
Chick-fil-A continually donates millions of dollars to groups that oppose same-sex marriage and other homophobic agendas.
Most famously they supported Proposition 8 to take away equal rights from LGBT people in California in 2008.
Cisco
Cisco is supposedly a trusted technology company that sells corporate network infrastructure (routers, switches and things). Your company probably has Cisco gear in their server closet and ISP's all over the world run Cisco hardware.
With their position and level of trust they should know better, but Cisco has implemented some of the most blatant backdoors that I have ever seen in my entire career in tech.
Cisco Architecture for Lawful Intercept
Attackers could exploit these backdoors and not leave any audit trail. That’s how the lawful intercept protocol was designed so that ISP employees can’t tell when a law enforcement agent logs to the ISP’s routers (even though law enforcement is supposed to gain this access with a court order or other legal access request).
Furthermore, this protocol could be abused by ISP employees because no one else working for the ISP could then tell when someone gained access to the routers via Cisco’s Architecture for Lawful Intercept.
- Cisco: We've killed another critical hard-coded root password bug, patch urgently (Sept 2018) — this makes what, six now in 2018?
- Backdoors Keep Appearing in Cisco's Routers (July 2018) — five backdoors discovered in five months in 2018.
- Cisco Removes Backdoor Account, Fourth in the Last Four Months (June 2018)
- Cisco fixes hard-coded password 'backdoor' flaw in Wi-Fi access points (2016)
- Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US (2015) — Security researchers discovered a hidden "knock sequence" that allowed remote access to the Cisco routers. When confronted, Cisco "fixed" the problem by shuffling the knock sequence around. The security researches discovered the new sequence again because of course they did.
Facebook has been having a really bad 2018 since the Cambridge Analytica scandal began. Only started collecting links here 12/6/18, needs some backfilling.
First are some questionable choices by Facebook management:
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Facebook accused of striking 'secret deals over user data' - BBC News ‒ leaked internal exec emails about their purposefully privacy-infringing business practices.
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Allowed some companies to retain full access to users' friends' data, even after closing the general privacy hole in 2014/2015 as related to the Cambridge Analytica leaks.
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They were aware the Android permission change to log users' call and text history would be controversial before they even launched it, and purposefully directed users attention away from the feature.
Michael LeBeau (Facebook product manager):
"As you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the 'read call log' permission... This is a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it...[The danger is] screenshot of the scary Android permissions screen becomes a meme (as it has in the past), propagates around the web, it gets press attention, and enterprising journalists dig into what exactly the new update is requesting, then write stories about "Facebook uses new Android update to pry into your private life in ever more terrifying ways".
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As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants (NY Times) ‒ "Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."
- Non-NY Times article: Facebook let tons of companies get info about you, including Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft (CNBC)
Some bad things that Facebook's platform allowed for (not necessarily the fault of the Facebook company, but noteworthy nonetheless):
Symantec
Symantec is a security company most known for creating Norton Antivirus. Their response to a security incident is apparently to shut the fuck up and pray that nobody ever finds out about it.
- Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States — In 2006 hackers stole the source code to pcAnywhere and the public did not learn of this until 2012, when hackers posted the source code online. Only then did Symantec admit that they knew about it the entire time. Not only did this play a role in hacked voting machines but it compromised the security of all customers of the pcAnywhere software.
- Google takes Symantec to the woodshed for mis-issuing 30,000 HTTPS certs — Symantec has repeatedly had problems with this; the result is that Symantec has lost all trust by browser vendors and has been revoked from the trusted Certificate Authority Store on Chrome and Firefox. SSL providers are supposed to be among the most trusted companies because the security of the Internet rests in their hands. If hackers can trick Symantec into giving them an SSL cert for
google.comthen countries like Iran can intercept private communications putting lives in real danger.
TikTok
Chinese propaganda social network. I hear buzz about all its problems here and there on Reddit, here is a comment by u/surprisedduck26 that sums it up nicely in one place:
I'm curious why people are supporting the TikTok platform in any way when you could easily just use your phone camera.
I was ban from the reddit sub r/TikTok for posting a single comment about how TikTok censors Tiananmen and Tibet references. Sure would be a shame if others knew about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/d948n2/tiktok_censors_references_to_tiananmen_and_tibet?sort=confidence
But who cares about that right? It's not like...
TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-users-videos-suppressed.html
TikTok has been accused of secretly gathering "vast quantities" of user data and sending it to servers in China. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50640110
TikTok is paying the FTC a fine of $5.7 million for collecting the data of kids under 13. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/28/18244996/tiktok-children-privacy-data-ftc-settlement
TikTok censors all reference to the Hong Kong protests. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks-beijing-roots-fuel-censorship-suspicion-it-builds-huge-us-audience/?noredirect=on
TikTok has had children as young as 8 targeted by sexual predators and Police are urging parents to check the app privacy settings. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-google&source=android-browser&q=cache:https:%2F%2Fwww.scotsman.com%2Flifestyle-2-15039%2Ftiktok-privacy-settings-everything-parents-need-to-know-about-the-video-app-1-4872619
TikTok's privacy page admits to collecting as much data as possible, from meta data, GPS location, and pulls all contact information on someone's Facebook and instagram (if connected) and phone, while allowing themselves to use this data for whatever they want.
https://www.tiktok.com/legal/privacy-policy?lang=en
TikTok has been labeled a "threat to national security" by the USA government.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rU0zzHKHxC8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6jOJe9U9Wj8
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/technology/tiktok-national-security-review.html
TikTok is ban from US Navy mobile devices, as it's been declared a cybersecurity threat.
TikTok had vulnerabilities as recent as last month, which allowed attackers to gain control of users accounts to upload videos or view private videos, while a separate flaw allowed attackers to retrieve personal information from TikTok user accounts through the company’s website.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/technology/tiktok-security-flaws.html
Its almost as if Tiktok is China’s attempt at pushing their propaganda out to the world while also having massive privacy issues. China has realized that to control the global population you have to control social media and what people see. So for the last year they have been pouring a ton of money into getting their social media app to be accepted and widely used- through a campaign of paid content creation/submission, and vote manipulation. Once they have widescale buy in, their backdoor monitoring and data collection will have free reign.
I find it a worrying trend how easily Reddit is blindly uvoting these videos to the front page and supporting a company with such privacy concerns, and an obvious agenda that is censoring and controlling the information you see.
The Chinese propaganda machine is already being pushed on Reddit threads just like this one.
There are reddit accounts that clearly have a pro-Chinese agendas posting in threads like these daily. I recently called out one of these reddit users via this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/esks18/z/ffbixet
and low and behold the user u/littleking123 immediately deleted their account. Thankfully you can see a web cache of their pro-TikTok, pro-China, and anti-Hong Kong comments here.
It's still not too late to do something. I'm posting this here for exposure so others know what's going on.