Section:GDN 1N PaGe:21 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 17:12 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Friday 6 September 2019 The Guardian •
National^21
Julia Carrie Wong
Hundreds of millions of Facebook
users’ phone numbers were exposed in
an open online database, the company
has confi rmed, in the latest example
of Facebook’s past privacy lapses com-
ing back to haunt its users.
More than 419m Facebook IDs and
phone numbers were stored in an
online server that was not password
protected, the technology website
TechCrunch reported. The dataset
included about 133m records for users
in the US, 18m for users in Britain and
50m for users in Vietnam.
The database was taken offl ine after
TechCrunch contacted the web host.
Facebook said it was investigating
when and by whom the database was
compiled. A spokeswoman said the
actual number of users whose informa-
tion was exposed was approximately
210m, because the 419m records con-
tained duplicates.
The records were probably amassed
using a tool that Facebook disabled
in April 2018 after the Cambridge
Analytica controversy revealed how
Facebook’s lax approach to privacy
had allowed a political consultancy
to obtain personal information from
tens of millions of profi les.
Until then, Facebook allowed any-
one to search for users by their phone
number, a seemingly benign tool for
fi nding an individual with a common
name that was also readily hijacked by
data scrapers.
“Malicious actors have also abused
these features to scrape public pro-
fi le information by submitting phone
numbers or email addresses they
already have through search,” Face-
book’s chief technology offi cer, Mike
Schroepfer , wrote at the time. “Given
the scale and sophistication of the
activity , we believe most people on
Facebook could have had their public
profi le scraped in this way.”
A Facebook spokeswoman said in
a statement: “This dataset is old and
appears to have information obtained
before we made changes last year to
remove people’s ability to fi nd oth-
ers using their phone numbers. The
dataset has been taken down and we
have seen no evidence that Facebook
accounts were compromised.”
She did not say if Facebook would
inform users exposed or off er mitiga-
tion. The company is still investigating.
Phone numbers are an increasingly
important key to people’s identities –
and a potential vulnerability. Skilled
attackers can often leverage a mobile
phone number and information
gained through data brokers or social
media sites (such as home address,
previous addresses, family members )
to persuade mobile phone carriers to
transfer a number to a diff erent phone.
The latest high-profi le victim of
such attacks, known as Sim swap-
ping, was Twitter’s chief executive,
Jack Dorsey , whose Twitter account
was hijacked last week.
On Wednesday, Twitter announced
that it was temporarily disabling the
ability for users to send tweets through
SMS, or text messages, due to “vulner-
abilities that need to be addressed by
mobile carriers”.Facebook admits at
least 200m phone
numbers ‘exposed’
Sam Jones
MadridEleven more women have accused the
opera singer and conductor Plácido
Domingo of sexual harassment,
including one who says he groped her
so hard she cried out in pain.
The new allegations come three
weeks after Associated Press reported
eight singers and a dancer had told the
news agency they had been sexually
harassed by the Spanish singer in inci-
dents spanning three decades from
the late 1980s.
Domingo, 78, initially described the
accusations as “deeply troubling, and
as presented, inaccurate”. He added:
“I believed that all of my interactions
and relationships were always wel-
comed and consensual. People whoknow me or who have worked with
me know that I am not someone who
would intentionally harm, off end or
embarrass anyone.”
Angela Turner Wilson, 48, a soprano
who worked with Domingo in the
Washington Opera’s 1999-2000 season
told AP that while she had been aware
of Domingo’s reputation for inappro-
priate behaviour, she had wanted to
believe his interest in her was pro-
fessional. But one evening beforeMore women accuse opera star
Domingo of sexual harassment
a performance, she said, Domingo
slipped his hands under her bra straps
then reached down into her robe and
grabbed her breast. “It hurt,” she said.
“It was not gentle. He groped me hard.”
Wilson said she had been motiv-
ated to come forward by Domingo’s
reaction to earlier allegations and his
suggestion that “the rules and stand-
ards by which we are and should be
measured against today are very dif-
ferent than they were in the past”.
“What woman would ever want him
to grab their breast? And it hurt,” she
said. “Then I had to go on stage and act
like I was in love with him.”
AP said backstage employees had
recounted shielding young women
from the star as administrators looked
the other way. One woman has accused
Domingo of putting his hand down her
skirt and three others said he forced
kisses on them in a dressing room,
hotel and at a lunch meeting.
A spokeswoman for Domingo
accused AP of conducting an “inac-
curate [and] unethical” campaign
against the singer.▼ Plácido Domingo in the title role of
Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra
at the Royal Opera House in 2010
PHOTOGRAPH: TRISTRAM KENTON/GUARDIAN‘What woman would
want him to grab her
breast? And it hurt’Angela Turner Wilson
Soprano18m
Number of records for Facebook
users in the UK discovered on the
unsecured online serverRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws