[AmericanChopper]

Sure, and I don’t disagree that it’s a bad situation for Meta to have created. It’s being fined for “potentially violating” a statute that I find objectionable. Being breached implies that some harm befell consumers, this article (and the others I’ve read about this incident) don’t make any reference to an actual harm being uncovered.

[ethbr1]

I think there should be a "reasonable expectation" of a breach having happened.

Secrets laying in an accessible place for 7 years... reasonable expectation is someone looked at them.

[AmericanChopper]

It’s a reasonable possibility, it’s also a reasonable possibility that nobody did.

But somebody incidentally seeing them, and maybe, maybe not recognising they were passwords is not a breach. Somebody intentionally misusing them would be, and I haven’t seen anything to suggest there’s a reasonable expectation that that occurred.

A reasonable expectation is also not the standard of proof I’d generally like to see from a government attempting to enforce a penalty.

[ethbr1]

I think knowledge of them would absolutely be a breach, because you wouldn't be able to guarantee that person didn't remember and subsequently misuse them.

[AmericanChopper]

If the data was publicly leaked then this argument would have some merit. But it wasn’t, the only people who could have accessed these passwords were insiders, and those passwords were used to protect data that many of them would have access to anyway.

There is no evidence any unauthorised party gained access to any private data as a result of this incident. There is no evidence that any authorised party misused data as a result of this incident. A “breach” that involves no unauthorised access, and no misuse is not a breach.

A control failure occurred, and it was remedied in the most appropriate way possible.

[ethbr1]

Given the frequency of customers reusing passwords across sites, the risk isn't specific to Meta data.