WASHINGTON: Phone numbers linked to more than 400 million Facebook accounts were listed online in the latest privacy lapse for the social media giant, US media reported Wednesday.
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An exposed server stored 419 million records on users across several databases – including 133 million US accounts, more than 50 million in Vietnam, and 18 million in Britain, according to technology news site TechCruch.
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The databases listed Facebook user IDs – unique digits attached to each account – the profiles’ phone numbers, as well as the gender listed by some accounts and their geographical locations, technology website TechCrunch reported.
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The server was not password protected, meaning anyone could access the databases, and remained online until late Wednesday when TechCrunch contacted the site’s host.
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Facebook confirmed parts of the report but downplayed the extent of the exposure, saying that the number of accounts so far confirmed was around half of the reported 419 million.
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It added that many of the entries were duplicates and that the data was old.
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“The dataset has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised,” a Facebook spokesperson told AFP.
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Following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, when a firm used Facebook’s lax privacy settings to access millions of users’ personal details, the company disabled a feature that allowed users to search the platform by phone numbers.
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The exposure of a user’s phone number leaves them vulnerable to spam calls, SIM-swapping – as recently happened to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey – with hackers able to force-reset the passwords of the compromised accounts.
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