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Data of 500 Million Facebook Users Leaked Online

facebook, big tech, demandas

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Personal information belonging to some 500 million Facebook users in 106 countries were leaked by a user on a hacking forum, while the social network clarified that this is a problem that was resolved in 2019.

According to Business Insider, the exposed data, which includes phone numbers, Facebook ID, names, locations, emails, among others, correspond, among others, to more than 32 million users in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom and 6 million in India.

The publication said it had reviewed the leaked data such as phone numbers and email addresses.

“A database of that size containing private information, such as phone numbers for many of Facebook’s users, would undoubtedly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to conduct social engineering attacks (or) hacking attempts,” Alon Gal, chief technology officer at cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, told the media outlet.

On Twitter, Gal noted that the records were leaked “for free” and indicated that means that if someone has a Facebook account, “it’s very likely that the phone number used for the account was leaked.”

“I have yet to see Facebook acknowledge this absolute negligence with their data,” he said.

Facebook spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois noted on Twitter that “this is old data that was already reported in 2019.”

“We found and fixed this problem in August 2019,” she clarified.

Facebook has been implicated in the past in numerous scandals concerning its management of privacy, the most resounding of them being that of the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which used an application to collect millions of data from Internet users of the platform without their consent for political purposes.

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