533 Million Facebook Users' Data Leaked: "Worse Than You Think," Says Tech Writer

533 Million Facebook Users' Data Leaked: "Worse Than You Think," Says Tech Writer

A user in a "low-level hacking forum" on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free, according to multiple news reports.

"The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India," writes Business Insider. " It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses."

Tech analysts are raising concerns. 

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"While Facebook says that the vulnerability that allowed this information to be scraped was patched in August 2019, that does nothing to protect the information that has already been leaked," wrote Jason Aten for Inc.com. "It also does nothing to alleviate concerns that Facebook collects and monetizes its users' personal information, but has a poor record of protecting that information from bad actors."

He continues:

"In that sense, the leak of a database that includes information on a half-billion users is worse than it might seem for two reasons. First, Facebook's response shows that the company continues to lack any real sense of understanding of its responsibility to protect its users' privacy.

'This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,' a spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement. "We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.'

It's as if the company wants to take credit for fixing a problem because it patched a massive hole in its security, even though none of the stolen goods have been recovered. I reached out to Facebook directly, but the company did not immediately respond."