Facebook says it has no plans to inform 533 million users affected by data leak

Facebook does not intend to inform more than 530 million users whose details have leaked online, reports Reuters.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the company did not have confidence if it had full visibility on which users would need to be informed. The spokesperson also said that users could not fix the issue at their end and that the “data was publicly available in deciding not to notify users.”

Earlier, Facebook said that hackers had accessed the user data through scraping. The company also stressed that it was not done through hacking. It added that the scraping happened before September 2019 and had already fixed the problem.

“When we became aware of how malicious actors were using this feature in 2019, we made changes to the contact importer. In this case, we updated it to prevent malicious actors from using software to imitate our app and upload a large set of phone numbers to see which ones matched Facebook users,” the company said in a blog post.

Facebook also said that hackers obtained a limited set of information about those users included in their public profiles. The data did not include sensitive information such as health, passwords, or finance.

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According to the Reuters report, the collated data could be used for other kinds of hacks or abuses. The Verge points out that the scraped data included information, such as birthdays, locations, full names, and phone numbers.

If you are concerned about your data being part of the latest leak, Facebook recommends updating the “How People Find and Contact You” feature on the platform. It has also advised users to take regular privacy check-ups on the platform.

There are a few online tools as well to look up whether your phone number is part of the leak or not. Indian users can now find out whether their data was affected or leaked through fbleaks.com. Or, users can visit Have I Been Pwned website to search for their phone numbers.