Facebook admits ‘most’ of its 2BILLION users had their personal info taken
FROM 50 million to 2.2 billion in a matter of weeks, Facebook has finally revealed the true extent of shady data gathering on its platform - and it affects all users.
The embattled social network is blaming the sorry mess on its search feature, which lets you look up others by phone number or email address.
As it's been doing since the start of its data crisis, the company claims some shady folk took advantage of Facebook search to hoover up your public profile data, and (as usual) there was nothing it could do about it.
The excuses began with Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, who the abuses of the feature and what Facebook is doing to restrict the user info app makers can access.
"Malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery," he said.
"Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."
Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg also commented on the potential scale of the data gathering in a with members of the press on Wednesday.
"This is a feature that’s been available for a while and a lot of people use it in the right way, but we’ve also seen some scraping," said the Facebook founder.
"I would assume if you had that setting turned on, that someone at some point has accessed your public information in this way."
Facebook is now shutting down the search by phone or email function and will change how users recover their account to reduce the risk of data scraping.
Facebook Data Breach – what happened?
Here's what you need to know...
- A personality quiz app obtained data for 270,000 willing Facebook users
- But it also sucked up info on all of their Facebook friends
- Facebook said this allowed data for 87 million users to be sold on to UK research firm Cambridge Analytica
- Cambridge Analytica helps politicians and lobby groups create propaganda
- The data was supposedly used to boost the Brexit campaign and get Trump into the White House
- Facebook is said to have known about the data breach since 2015
- The social network asked companies with the data to delete it, but didn't enforce the rule
- The Guardian revealed the incident in an exposé thanks to Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie
- Many countries are now investigating whether Facebook has broken the law
- It's made worse by Facebook's April admission that 'most' of the site's 2billion users have had their data hoovered up by outsiders
- Mark Zuckerberg is due to appear before US Congress to testify about the matter soon
- But the billionaire Facebook boss has refused to accept an invite from UK MPs to explain himself in Britain
It has also limited the amount of data apps can gather from Instagram, and is imposing similar restrictions across its own platform, impacting Facebook Events, Groups, Pages, and logins.
Facebook's data woes started last month, when multiple reports revealed that a company called Cambridge Analytica had obtained the info of 50 million of the platform's users without their permission.
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Yesterday, the company admitted that the number may actually be 87 million.
Zuckerberg also recently revealed that Facebook scans all the images and text in private messages sent between its users.
The tech billionaire, 33, says the social media giant checks the content of messages on its Messenger app in case they conflict with its guidelines.
The Facebook CEO will have to explain (and likely apologise) for the debacle again in front of Congress on Aprill 10 and 11.
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