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Facebook: Strategy around the data leak publicly

After the big data leak at Facebook came to light earlier this month, which made the data of more than 533 million Facebook users public, it looks like the social media platform wants to normalize the tapping of data. The information became known through an accidental email sent to the wrong recipient.

Email exposes Facebook’s actions

Through an email that was apparently sent to a journalist by mistake, Facebook’s strategy regarding the data leak has become known. So far, the company is driving the strategy of not doing anything publicly and also not informing those affected. In addition, the U.S. company assumes that such data leaks will continue to occur and even wants to “normalize” this. This information can be gleaned from the e-mail that came to the attention of a Dutch journalist.

The authenticity of the “internal” email was confirmed by Facebook to Motherboard magazine. It was sent shortly after the data leak. The email reveals the strategy, namely to show that this problem exists throughout the entire industry. Of course, this was helped by the fact that huge data leaks have also become known at LinkedIn and Clubhouse. However, the other two involved information that was publicly viewable. Here, the data from the profiles and from other websites was merged. So all data, which the users themselves have set.

No hacker attack

The tapping of data in such quantities is classified as an incident that happens so repeatedly and will continue to happen in the future. In the case of the data leak earlier this month, the company insisted that the published data did not come from a hack, but was much older. Facebook also claims to have already closed the leak and thus considers the issue to be settled. In the data leak, data of more than 500 million users has been published, including the names, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers and also biographical information. With Facebook’s attitude that the data is older, the group probably wants to escape the data protection obligations of the GDPR and also towards the USA.

According to the social network, the data was most likely tapped through the address book matching function with user data. However, data that was not released for others to view, such as phone numbers, was also tapped here.

Wave of spam SMS

With the data from the Facebook data leak becoming public, it is very difficult to prevent it from being sold to senders of spam SMS. Even if it violates the terms of use will probably criminals rather not bother. At Facebook, cell phone numbers for two-factor authentication were particularly affected, which were not visible to others. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that the data was compiled from public information, as was the case with LinkedIn and Cloubhouse. The social network probably also does not know who all was affected by the data leak. All it said about it was that the data is now public and users can’t do anything about it now. The consequence of the data leak was an extreme wave of dangerous spam SMS, for example, about alleged package deliveries from the post office.

Simon Lüthje

I am co-founder of this blog and am very interested in everything that has to do with technology, but I also like to play games. I was born in Hamburg, but now I live in Bad Segeberg.

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After the big data leak at Facebook came to light earlier this month, which made the data of more than 533 million Facebook users public, it looks like the social media platform wants to normalize the tapping of data. The information became known through an accidental email sent to the wrong recipient. Email exposes Facebook’s … (Weiterlesen...)

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