Facebook won't tell you if you're part of massive data breach

New Delhi, April 8

Facebook is in no mood to notify those who were affected by a massive data breach involving 533 million users, including over 61 lakh Indians.

The company, however, said that it has "made changes to the contact importer" to stop the scraping of the data which is old.

"We have teams dedicated to addressing these kinds of issues and understand the impact they can have on the people who use our services. It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019," Facebook said in a statement this week.

Scraping is a common tactic that often relies on automated software to lift public information from the internet that can end up being distributed in online forums like this.

"As a result of the action we took, we are confident that the specific issue that allowed them to scrape this data in 2019 no longer exists," the company said.

The company said that it believes the data in question was scraped from people's Facebook profiles by malicious actors using its contact importer prior to September 2019.

This feature was designed to help people easily find their friends to connect with on our services using their contact lists.

"When we became aware of how malicious actors were using this feature in 2019, we made changes to the contact importer. In this case, we updated it to prevent malicious actors from using software to imitate our app and upload a large set of phone numbers to see which ones matched Facebook users," Facebook explained.

There are third-party platforms that can still tell you if you were part of the Facebook data breach.

One such website that tracks data breaches is "Have I Been Pwned".

Put in your email address or phone number and it will not only tell you if you've been part of the latest Facebook breach but also breaches in the past.

The Facebook leaked data includes Facebook ID numbers, profile names, email addresses, location information, gender details, job data, and other details.--IANS

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.