Hackers breach Quora.com and steal password data for 100 million users

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Oh, for fuck sake.

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That’s the impetus to delete my fucking Quora account. It’s just not worth it and it’s long been clear that they don’t give a shit about security since they can’t be bothered to add two factor auth to their site.

I seem to get inundated with nothing but gun questions these days I’m my digest (I must have clicked on a gun story once and their algorithm decided that I must want to see all the fun posts in the world now), and their web site is user-hostile as hell basically forcing you into using their shitty app whenever possible.

(Like this shit that is uncloseable and blocks the entire site if you scroll to far through a thread without using the app)

So fuck 'em. There’s plenty of better communities out there.

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Fucking Quora. I got an e-mail from them saying my account is among the breached. I didn’t even know I had an account.

I just went to log in long enough to delete it. I checked my passwords list, and nothing for Quora was there, so I figured I probably used Google to log in.

Open Quora in a browser tab. It serves me the French-language page, because it’s yet another non-Canadian company which doesn’t handle localisation and multilingualism well. Cool, I can read French well enough to click the “Sign in with Google” button.

Quora gets very excited that I signed in with a French page. I had to tell it twice that no, I do not want to add French to my list of used languages. I’m here to delete, not discouter.

Apparently I never set up topic preferences, and Quora will not let me continue until I choose at least 10. Hey Quora, ever heard of a Skip button? They’re awesome. It’s very obvious now this account barely ever existed and should have been cleaned out by Quora a loooong time ago.

After some thrashing around to find the settings page, I hit the delete link… only to be told I need to create an application-only password with Google before I can delete the account.

All this to delete an account I definitely haven’t used since… 2008? Maybe? I have a vague memory of trying to read Quora on Slate.com way back when and then giving up very quickly because it was so invasive.

I will complete the process, but yikes, this is a great way to show how not to treat users, especially after you’ve been hacked.

ETA: okay, deleted. Sweet FSM, it kept serving me the French page even after it knew who I was and knew I preferred English. Eeek.

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