Facebook has announced that it doesn¡¯t intend to notify the 533 million users whose phone numbers and personal data have leaked online for free, Reuters reported.
ALSO READ:?533 Million Facebook User's Private Data Leaked, 6 Million Are Indian Users
The social media giant cited two main reasons for its decision to keep people in the void. One, that it wasn¡¯t confident who all to notify; and second, that the data was already publicly available and those affected won¡¯t be able to do anything about it.
Business Insider reported that more than half a million Facebook users¡¯ accounts from 106 countries, including over 6 million on users in India, were leaked on a low-level hacking forum.?
Since then, the large trough of leaked data--including birthdays, locations, full names, phone numbers and email addresses in some cases--has been floating on the internet.
On Tuesday, Facebook said in a blog post?that they ¡°believe the data in question was scraped from people¡¯s Facebook profiles by malicious actors¡± using the contact importer prior to September 2019--a vulnerability that it has since fixed.
However, BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac pointed out that Facebook¡¯s explanation doesn¡¯t do justice to several lawsuits filed against controversial surveillance company Clearview AI for scraping photos from Instagram and Facebook.
Even as the data is a couple of years old, it still presents a cybersecurity and privacy risk to those whose personal data may be exposed. Hackers may use that information to impersonate them or scam them into handing over login credentials.
And instead of apologising for its failure to protect user¡¯s privacy, Facebook is looking to shape this hack as merely a breach of its terms and conditions, just like it did with the?2018 Cambridge Analytica Scandal.
David Gilbert in Motherboard notes that the blog post also fails to mention when and how many time the vulnerability was exploited.
Okay folks, so Facebook isn¡¯t going to tell you if you¡¯re one of the 533 million people whose data was leaked online. But you can use the popular third-party website Have I Been Pwned to search your email or phone number in the entire leaked database. Bonus: it also tells you if your personal details have been compromised in previous data breaches as well.
There¡¯s also another website that caters specifically to the Indian audience. Users just need to log in their phone number to check if they were affected by the breach.?