Facebook says it will not inform over 530 million users whose data has been leaked

Facebook reportedly has no plans to let the users, whose data was leaked in the massive data breach involving the social media giant. The breach exposed the personal information of as many as 533 million Facebook users on the web. The data included the phone number, Facebook ID, birthdates, and more of the users. However, Facebook in a statement said that the data has not been obtained through their system, it has been scraped from their platform before September 2019.

A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that the company does not plan to notify the users that might be affected in the data leak. He also said that “it also took into account that users could not fix the issue and that the data was publicly available in deciding not to notify users.”

Facebook on Tuesday published the blog acknowledging the data breach but said that the data was stolen back in 2019. “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. This is another example of the ongoing, adversarial relationship technology companies have with fraudsters who intentionally break platform policies to scrape internet services. 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. But since there’s still confusion about this data and what we’ve done, we wanted to provide more details here,” the social media giant said in a blog.

Facebook has said that data was scraped from the social media sites by cybercriminals using their contact importer feature. The feature was introduced by the company to help users find their friends. However, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company said that it made changes to the contact importer way back in 2019 when it became aware of how malicious actors were using this feature.

“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. Through the previous functionality, they were able to query a set of user-profiles and obtain a limited set of information about those users included in their public profiles. The information did not include financial information, health information, or passwords,” the blog read.

However, the cybersecurity experts have stated that the breach has not as old as Facebook claims it to be.