[ninv]

"The scammers have "done their research" using publicly available information, including sites like Facebook, he said. They identify vulnerabilities to exploit."

Stop posting personal info on Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin. Best way to keep in touch is Whatsapp and any other personal messenger app.

[duskwuff]

> Best way to keep in touch is Whatsapp…

…which is owned by Facebook, and shares account information with the Facebook Platform?

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/25/12638698/whatsapp-to-start...

[rdtsc]

Are you suggesting these people work for Whatsapp?

You could make the news with that kind of info.

[duskwuff]

Not at all. Just pointing out the inconsistency in recommending that people avoid social media sites like Facebook... and use a tool that's owned by Facebook, and which shares account information with it, as a replacement.

[rdtsc]

But it is a different situation. The implication is people posted on Facebook and it wasn't Facebook who ran the IRS scheme by reading the data on the backend, the data was shared by the users. WhatsApp doesn't work like Facebook's main product, it is more like SMS for example.

So the ownership of Facebook is irrelevant in this case.

Now perhaps it is possible to argue if someone hacked into Facebook to steal all data. But I don't think that's the case here.

[ninv]

No one is suggesting this, you are implying this. Stop distorting the conversation

[rdtsc]

The implication is posting to Facebook and then using WhatsApp is the same and IRS scammers could have gotten the information from both because they are owned by Facebook.

But the point of ownership of Facebook is moot unless the claim is that somehow all this data was scrapped from the backend (WhatsApp is a messaging app, even claims end to end encryption too).

[logicuce]

But that information is not available to a random stalker