Posted on 04/10/2021 8:20:38 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Facebook decided not to notify over 530 million of its users whose personal data was lifted in a breach sometime before August 2019 and was recently made available in a public database. Facebook also has no plans to do so, a spokesperson said.
Phone numbers, full names, locations, some email addresses, and other details from user profiles were posted to an amateur hacking forum on Saturday, Business Insider reported last week.
The leaked data includes personal information from 533 million Facebook users in 106 countries.
In response to the reporting, Facebook said in a blog post on Tuesday that "malicious actors" had scraped the data by exploiting a vulnerability in a now-defunct feature on the platform that allowed users to find each other by phone number.
The social media company said it found and fixed the issue in August 2019 and its confident the same route can no longer be used to scrape that data.
"We don't currently have plans to notify users individually," a Facebook spokesman told NPR.
According to the spokesman, the company does not have complete confidence in knowing which users would need to be notified. He also said that in deciding whether to notify users, Facebook weighed the fact that the information was publicly available and that it was not an issue that users could fix themselves.
The information did not include financial information, health information or passwords, Facebook said, but the data leak still leaves users vulnerable, security experts say.
"Scammers can do an enormous amount with little information from us," says CyberScout founder Adam Levin, a cybersecurity expert and consumer protection advocate. In the case of this breach, he said, "It's serious when phone numbers are out there. The danger when you have phone numbers in particular is a universal identifier."
Phone numbers are increasingly used to connect people to their digital presence, including the use of two-factor authentication via text message and phone calls to verify one's identity.
The misuse of its user data is a familiar battle for Facebook, and its handling of user privacy has endured scrutiny.
In July 2019, months before patching up the aforementioned issue, Facebook reached a $5 billion settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for violating an agreement with the agency to protect user privacy.
To find out whether your personal information was leaked in the breach, you can check the data tracking tool, HaveIBeenPwnd. Its creator, Troy Hunt, updated the site with the latest data from the Facebook leak. Hunt said that 65% of the latest batch of data had already been added to the tracker from previous leaks.
Keep using Facebook suckers.....
Well, I dont have Farcebook so all’s well..
“We don’t currently have plans to notify users individually,”
**************
Read: Our users don’t deserve to know their personal data is vulnerable and likely in someone else’s hands.
Suckerberg is just ticked he didn’t get to sell the user info before the hacker did.
Just assume all your personal data was breeched and drop facebook. By the way, your foolish if you still used it in the first place.
Facebook and Amazon are about the most evil corporations ever conceived. They are vile-
They tout themselves as “ethical” by jumping on these faddy bandwagons but in reality believe in nothing except their bottom line. These businesses exist because they violate people privacy, exploit labor in the worst imaginable ways, they have no loyalty to their employees, country, religion, or anything for that matter.
Anyone still using Suckerberg’s Fakebook is just downright stupid.
Waiting for the lawsuits to be drawn up...........
I found some huge price gouging being done on some Amazon products, alerted them of such and even posted comments indicating such. Their response: No response and my posts were either canned/removed or not posted after review.
Both of them, along with Google, Twitter, etc. need to be broken up in Ma Bell fashion like yesterday.
Now that is a bald-faced lie. Even if the lie was true, I am sure one of the Facebook programmers could kick out some script to leverage their advertising platform and send the message out as an "ad". I am certain that they could have it working in under two weeks. and I making a statement based on being a IT professional working in the corporate world for 25 years and I've worked with the edge no databases that Facebook uses to hold customer data.
I have six different Facebook accounts with fake identities. I hope they’re ALL compromised.
That explains my phone call from The Firm whereby I was told that a complaint was filed against me probably leading up to legal action. I asked who they were . Polk county “documents” department. They had my cell number , name and dob.
I was on Facebook for some very rudimentary, infrequent networking purposes up until the middle of last year. Then I learned that my account had been signed into from Houston, 300 miles away. I immediately terminated/deleted my account. I had no personal info entered anyway - even the birthday I provided was fake.
Simple explanation-—
Dear FB useres.
Hey, you joined on your own free will. Had you not signed up we wouldn’t have had your info available to be hacked. Your bad.
Thanks, your pal Mark.
“We don’t currently have plans to notify users individually,”
I hope some lawyers come up with a good class action lawsuit. How come other companies have to notify their users of any leaks?
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