The personal information of over 500 million Facebook users was discovered on a hacker website.
Although the information appears to be many years old, it serves as another example of the large amount of data gathered by Facebook and other social media sites, as well as the limitations of how reliable that data is.
Business Insider was the first to write on the data set’s availability. It has information from 106 countries, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, places, birthdates, and email addresses, according to the publication.
For years, Facebook has struggled with data protection problems. Following allegations that the political firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed details on up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent, the social media giant removed a feature that allowed users to search for one another by phone number in 2018.
In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher discovered a database on the open internet containing the names, phone numbers, and unique user IDs of over 267 million Facebook users, almost all of whom were located in the United States. It’s unclear if the latest data dump has anything to do with this archive.
The Menlo Park, California-based organization said in a statement that this is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. “In August of this year, we discovered and resolved this issue.”
