In what could also be termed as the largest data leak, the delicate and personal data of more than 500 million Facebook customers was revealed online by a consumer in a low-level hacking discussion board. The leaked data contains non-public details akin to phone numbers, full names, places, electronic mail addresses, birthdays, and bios.
The data seems to be a number of years outdated, however it’s one other instance of the huge quantity of data collected by Facebook and other social media websites, and the boundaries to how safe that data is.
The availability of the data set was first reported by Business Insider. According to that publication, it has data from 106 international locations together with phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, places, birthdates, and electronic mail addresses.
Facebook has been grappling with data safety points for years. In 2018, the social media big disabled a function that allowed customers to seek for each other by way of phone quantity following revelations that the political agency Cambridge Analytica had accessed data on as much as 87 million Facebook customers with out their information or consent.
In December 2019, a Ukrainian safety researcher reported discovering a database with the names, phone numbers and distinctive consumer IDs of more than 267 million Facebook customers practically all US-based on the open web. It is unclear if the present data dump is said to this database.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” the Menlo Park, California-based firm mentioned in a press release. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
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