Facebook’s Media Strategy, Unwittingly Emailed to a Journalist, Seeks to Treat Large-Scale Leaks as ‘Normal’ ⇥ datanews.knack.be

Pieterjan Van Leemputten, on the Belgian DataNews website and translated by Google:

Facebook has a communication strategy ready to dismiss the data breach in which 533 million accounts, including three million Belgians , were leaked as affecting the entire sector. At the same time, the company expects this to happen and wants to use blog posts on the subject in the future to ensure that it no longer has to respond to every incident.

That is a short summary of an internal communication email that ended up in the Data News mailbox. The email itself dates from April 8 and comes from a communications officer at Facebook, and is addressed to the company’s PR staff in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Kind of funny how Facebook’s communications person was feeling pretty confident about the declining media attention the leak of half a billion users’ personal details was getting in an email accidentally sent to a reporter. Scraping is a fairly common practice but let’s not forget that Facebook allowed more than one to copy the records of hundreds of millions of people each without raising red flags.