Facebook has disclosed some important information that could cause a massive uproar from the site‘s 1.1 billion users.
In a unfortunate turn of events, Facebook has unintentionally exposed the phone numbers and email addresses of over 6 million users to unauthorized viewers.
Being the largest social networking site in the world, Facebook was effectively left with a great deal of egg on their face.
These data leaks began in 2012 and the company is blaming the breach on a technical glitch in it‘s mammoth archive of contact information.
The glitch caused Facebook users to inadvertently download other people‘s contact information when they were merely downloading the contact information of the people on their friends list.
Although the data breach has been going on since 2012, Facebook‘s security team was only alerted about the glitch last week. Needless to say, the team immediately jumped to work, and the glitch was no more within 24 hours.
However, Facebook only publicly acknowledged the problem last Friday – after it posted an “œimportant message“ on its blog.
A spokesman for Facebook Inc. has said that they decided to make the announcement of the glitch later because of a company procedure policy
This procedure stipulates that all regulators and users be notified before making a formal, public announcement.
Facebook said on it‘s blog: “œWe currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behavior on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing,“
The blog added that even though the breach in privacy was limited (although 6 million is quite a lot) they still feel embarrassed. The blog continued: “œit‘s still something we‘re upset and embarrassed by, and we‘ll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again,“
Unfortunately for Facebook, the privacy breach happened during an already unsteady time: it follows recent disclosures that several consumer Internet companies turned over troves of user-data to a massive electronic surveillance program run by U.S. intelligence forces.
The companies involved in the now infamous surveillance program, includes: Facebook, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc.
Facebook‘s glitch might be a thing of the past, but the growing number of suspicious users, especially in the current climate of data breaching, is ever growing.
Source: businesstech.co.za
