Facebook data leakage is not the first and the risk of fraud is growing

Phone numbers and e-mail addresses, as well as other personal data of Facebook users, have been leaked again in a hacker online forum. "This is old data that was talked about as early as 2019. We discovered the problem in August 2019 and solved it," a Facebook spokeswoman wrote on Twitter on Sunday. The problem, according to the DPA, is that once information such as e-mail addresses or telephone numbers is circulating, there is an increased risk that people will come across fake e-mails, which can look very authentic. Although the social network emphasizes that this is old data, many people have the same email addresses and telephone numbers for years. According to its own data, Facebook has 2.8 billion users who are active at least once a month. In 2019, the phone numbers of 420 million users appeared on the Internet after hackers exploited the feature to find friends based on certain data. Although phone numbers stored on Facebook were not visible, they could be largely assigned to individual users and stolen with the help of automated queries, so-called scraping. The purpose of this Facebook feature was to quickly find friends if the user knew his phone number. However, the thieves designed software with which, after entering the phone number, it was possible to find out which user it belonged to. Such a procedure violated the rules of Facebook, but it was technically possible and thieves rarely follow the rules. Although Facebook eventually deactivated this feature once it leaked, it is not possible to stop it from spreading. The scraping function on Facebook has always been problematic. As early as 2018, the network had to admit that with the help of automatic queries, it was possible to systematically collect all publicly available data from more than two billion users. Discussions later erupted over data protection around Clearview AI, which collected publicly visible photos, such as from the Instagram platform, and created a face recognition database. The company's customers include the US Police Department.