Facebook involved in yet another Data mishap
This time 419 million phone numbers got leaked
You can’t keep the social media giant out of the news, can you? The muddied privacy record of FB has gotten even worse. Ironically, It was only recently that I wrote about how Facebook had opened a privacy cafe in London where the platform users will be given “privacy check-ups” & trained on how to customize their Facebook privacy settings.
The move was clearly intended to salvage its reputation from the numerous data leaks & hacks that the company had been embroiled in the past few years. In the latest security lapse, hundreds of millions of phone numbers of Facebook account holders have been found online as reported by Tech Crunch.
The numbers amounted to 419 million records spread over several databases covering a wide array of the geographical region — 133 million users in the U.S, 50 million in Vietnam & 18 million in the U.K to name the most prominent ones. Tech Crunch performed an audit to verify the claim by looking at a number of records in the database by matching a known Facebook user’s phone number against their listed Facebook ID. Other records also revealed the user’s name, gender & location by country (Figure below).
