According to a report from UpGuard.com, user data from 540 million Facebook profiles were stored unsecured on a cloud storage of Amazon (S3). The data was collected via the Facebook app of the Mexican media company Cultura Colectiva. In principle, this type of data collection is permitted under the terms of use of the social network, but unencrypted storage in the public cloud is not.
The user data found contains information about comments, account name, Facebook IDs (e-mail addresses), likes and reactions to content, among other things.
Cultura Colectiva does not respond
UpGuard.com informed Cultura Colectiva twice by e-mail in January 2019 about the public storage of user data, but received no response in either case. The journalists then contacted the hoster Amazon directly, which in turn informed its customer Cultura Colectiva. This, too, did not result in the public storage of the data being terminated. Even a second report to Amazon did not change the situation. Only at the beginning of April, when the Bloomberg news agency wanted to get a statement from Facebook, was access to the cloud storage blocked for the public.
In addition to Cultura Colectiva’s gigantic data set, UpGuard found other user data on public Amazon cloud stores that could not be assigned to any company. In the meantime, access has also been blocked.
