The data of more than 500 million Facebook users have been found available on a website for hackers.
The information seems to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social networking sites and borders on how secure that information is.
Data set availability was first reported by Business Insider. According to this publication, it contains information from 106 countries including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, dates of birth and email addresses.
Facebook has been dealing with data security issues for years. In 2018, the social networking giant disabled a feature that allowed users to search for each other through phone numbers, following the revelations of Cambridge Analytica, which had accessed the information of some 87 million users, without their knowledge or consent.
In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher reported finding online a database with the names, phone numbers and unique IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users - almost all based on USA. It is still unclear whether the discovery made now is related to that of 2019.
A statement said the Facebook post was "outdated" and "stemmed from a problem that was fixed two years ago".
Source: The Guardian
