Facebook on Thursday said it is investigating the data exposure of 267 million users worldwide containing the names and phone numbers on a database.
According to a blog on the Comparitech website, the database was made available for download on an online hacker forum which is believed to belong to a crime group.
“We are looking into the matter and we believe that this information is brought before we made some changes in recent years“, said a Facebook spokesperson to AFP.
According to the Comaparitech safety researcher, Bob Diachenko has identified this leakage which contained the names, user IDs, and phone numbers of the Facebook users.
This issue was reported and the database was no longer made available since Thursday.
US regulators earlier this month said British consultancy Cambridge Analytica cheated on with the users’ data on the platform.
Federal Trade Commission, in its investigation on the data scandal, concluded how the political consulting firm involved in deceiving practices and obtained the users’ data for voter profiling and targeting. The British firm worked on Trump’s Presidential election in 2016 by conducting a personality test stating it would never download their data.
This issue has created a controversy about data privacy when Cambridge Analytica was able to access private details of millions of users worldwide.
Facebook is still undergoing antitrust and data privacy allegations. Now with this new leakage, a question of trust arises in the minds of all users.
Facebook in its investigation found that data of around 87million people in the US and others had been compromised and said it is a violation of its data privacy terms.
Recently Facebook paid a hefty amount of $5 billion in a settlement with the regulator for misusing the users’ private information.
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