Facebook: 533 million user data surfaced on the web

Facebook is facing a new data protection problem: An Internet forum posted personal data of 533 million users of the social network. They are said to be from a 2019 leak and accurate, according to Business Insider.

Personal data facilitates phishing

The leaked records contain a lot of personal data. In addition to the Facebook name, for example, the civic name, the email address used, phone numbers, biographical information and whereabouts are included. Anyone with such information has an easy game in phishing attacks: the personal data can be used to make contact emails more credible, which increases the likelihood of the desired response by those attacked.
A Facebook spokeswoman let it be known that this is data that has already been leaked in 2019, so the problem is not a current one. The magazine Business Insider reported meanwhile, in random checks the authenticity of the data could be proven.

Always scraping problems at Facebook

For Facebook, the publication of personal data is not the first major data protection problem. Already in the past, the company has repeatedly had to contend with scraping. Thus, Facebook admitted that through automated queries, which were not stopped by the company for a long time, probably all publicly available data of all users of the platform had been systematically collected. In 2019, phone numbers of 420 million users of the platform were collected via scraping. In addition, there are the scandals surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Clearview AI, which obtained their data directly or indirectly via Facebook platforms in order to influence election campaigns and to fill a database for operating facial recognition software, respectively, which is now being used by various US police authorities, among others.