Need to Know8 18 Sept - 1 Oct 2019
What happened?
Facebook has admitted to ye t another
privacy breach, this time leaking 419
million phone numbers shared with the
social network by its users. According to
reports, the information was stor ed on a
server connected to the web and not
password-protected, which meant
anyone who spotted the data could
view it without any effort.
The leaked data set included Facebook
IDs (made up of your us ername and a
unique number), as well as associated
phone numbers. Full name, gender and
country were listed for some of th e
records. It’s not yet clear who scraped
the data , but it has been removed by
the web-hosting company. The dataset
was spotted by securi ty researchers at
the GDI Founda tion.
Facebook previously collected phone
numbers so users could search for each
other, but the prac tice was stopped last
year after it becameclear that
scammers and political campaigns were
using Facebook’s automated tool to
scrape names and profiles by entering a
phone number.
This latest incident follows last year’s
data breach when hackers ac cessed the
data of more than 50 million users, as
well as the Cambridge Analytica
scandal. And it co mes as US regulators
pile on another an titrust investigation
into the company, with New York state
authorities looking into whether
Facebook has “endangered consumer
data , reduced the quality of co nsumers’
choi ces or incr eased the price of
advertising”. Facebook says it isn’t a
monopoly because there are plenty of
social-media alternativ es online, though
it now owns WhatsApp and Instagram.How will it affectyou?
Someof th e records were duplicates, so
the actual numberof users affe cted is
around210 million. Of those, about 18
million were UK Facebook users, whil e
133 million were in the US. The tool that
is su spected to have collected the data
was disabled last year, which Facebook
said su ggests the affe cted phone
numbers are old. However, tests by tech
news site TechCrunch shows plenty of
the numbers are still in use.
“This data set is old and appears to
have information obtained before we
made change s last year to remove
people’s ability to find others using their
phone numbers,” a Facebook
spokeswoman said in a statement sent
to journalists. “The data set has been
taken down and we have seen no
evidence th at Facebook accounts were
compromised.”
While it’s possible for your phone
numberto be harvested by data brokers
or abused by scammers, this particular
data breach isn’t likely to lead to other
serious repercussions. Still, it makes us
think twice about entering phone
numbers on Facebook, or letting the site
peek at our contacts list.
To leave Facebook, you can eitherdeac tivate or de lete your account: the
former removes it from active use,
letting you re-enable it later, whil e the
latter completely removes your profile.What dowethink?
Oh, Facebook! The company can’t seem
to catch a break. But we have no pity for
Mark Zuckerberg or his social network.
The reason this data was collected and
left unprotected is the company’s
profound disr espect for data privacy.
Facebook never needed our phone
numbers – the tool to search for friends
using their numberwas clearly nothing
other than a data grab to help further
identify users. Even after disabling the
phone-numbersearch tool, Facebook
kept asking users for phone numbers,
saying it was for securi ty authentication.
Yet last year, researchers revealed that
such numbers were used to target ads.
We think it’s right that regulators
consider whether Facebook has too
much power, and ensure th at it doesn’ t
further link ac counts across Instagram
and WhatsApp. It’s disappointing that
so many popu lar web prop erties have
beensnappedby Zuckerberg’s
company, given its many data issu es.
Of course, noneof th ese data
probl ems should come as a surp rise.
Facebook has failed time and again to
protect user privacy. The ti me may have
come to abandon it altogether.Facebook leaks phone
numbers of 210 million users
The leaked data is a year old but many of
the phone numbers still work