Adam Kos It wasn't exactly a happy Easter for Mark Zuckerberg and, by extension, the whole of Facebook. Over the weekend, his social network experienced a massive leak of personal data of users from all over the world. Specifically, there were more than 533 million users, and of this number, almost 1,4 million are even from the Czech Republic. At the same time, a security vulnerability was to blame for everything, which was already removed in August 2019.
The leak involves users from 106 countries, with the most affected being residents of the US (32 million) and Great Britain (11 million). The leaked data includes phone numbers, usernames, full user names, location data, dates of birth, bio texts and in some cases email addresses. Potential hackers cannot outright abuse this data, but they can use it to target advertising much better. Fortunately, passwords were not included - not even in encrypted form.
All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely that the phone number used for the account was leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook recognizing this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
- Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
It could be interest you
Facebook is one of those whose data about its users "escapes" quite regularly. In 2020 Mark Zuckerberg's company was embroiled in a somewhat controversial user privacy situation as it was confirmed that thousands of the service's developers had access to data from inactive users. Even before that, there was controversy about the case Cambridge Analytica, in which the company gained access to the data of anyone who consented to a "personality quiz" administered by a third party, but within Facebook.
And then there's Apple and the new changes to app tracking transparency policies, which Facebook has been fighting against since the introduction of iOS 14. Cupertino society as it can. Apple finally postponed the sharp implementation of the planned news until the release of iOS 14.5, which is, however, already behind the scenes. Facebook and everyone else can thus lose the ideal targeting of advertising and thus, of course, the corresponding profits. But it all depends on the users, whether they pause over the notifications themselves and possibly reject them, or continue to blindly trust Facebook and give it access to all their data.
