Alon Gal, a security researcher, reports that personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts have been leaked online for free.
“The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India,” according to Insider. “It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.”
Facebook Responds
Facebook has finally decided to address the issue, however, not in the way their users might like. A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that the company doesn’t plan to notify the users on whose data was exposed online.
In the personal data leaked online, there is a lot of information that one doesn’t want to be exposed online, including birthdays, locations, full names, and phone numbers.
Facebook cited two reasons as to why: The company is not confident on which users need to be notified and users wouldn’t be able to do anything about the data exposed online.
Tuesday, Facebook wrote on its blog, stating that it “believes” that data was scraped via contact importer before September 2019. This method is a violation of the company’s policies.
But as BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Mac notes, this doesn’t quite coincide with the fact that Facebook hasn’t addressed or filed lawsuits against controversial surveillance company Clearview AI for scraping photos from Instagram and Facebook.
