Hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ phone numbers were exposed in an open online database. The company confirmed Wednesday, in the latest example of Facebook’s past privacy lapses coming back to haunt its users.
An exposed server stored 419 million records on users across several databases, including 133 million US accounts, more than 50 million in Vietnam, and 18 million in Britain, according to technology news site TechCruch.
The databases listed Facebook user IDs — unique digits attached to each account, the profiles’ phone numbers, as well as the gender listed by some accounts and their geographical locations.
The server was not password protected. Meaning anyone could access the databases. More than 419m facebook id and phone numbers were stored in an online server that was not password protected. The technology website TechCrunch reported.
The dataset included about 133m records for users in the US, 18m records for users in the UK and 50m records for users in Vietnam.
database was taken offline after TechCrunch contacted the web host.
The dataset has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised. A Facebook spokesperson told AFP.
Following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal when a firm used Facebook’s lax privacy settings to access millions of users’s personal details. The company disabled a feature that allowed users to search the platform by phone numbers.
