Facebook made a bombshell admission about user information on Wednesday, in a startling revelation that’s almost certain to worsen the crisis around user privacy currently hanging over the world’s largest social network.
“Most” of its users may have had their personal data skimmed from the site by “malicious actors,” the company said in a blog post by Mike Schroepfer, its chief technology office. Meanwhile, up to 87 million users may have been affected by the leak of personal information to Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica – a number that was much bigger than previous estimates.
Shroepfer shared the new information about privacy compromises amid giving details about changes the company has made to its service, to better protect users’ personal data.
“We believe these changes will better protect people’s information while still enabling developers to create useful experiences,” he said in the post. “We know we have more work to do – and we’ll keep you updated as we make more changes”
Facebook, which has more than 2 billion users worldwide, has been reeling since a whistleblower disclosed that Cambridge Analytica, which assisted President Trump’s election campaign, gleaned data on million of Facebook users through an app written by a university researcher. Only 270,000 Facebook users actually installed the app, but due to Facebook’s data sharing policies at the time, the app was able to gather data on millions of their friends.
The initial estimates were that the app gathered data on some 50 million Facebook users. But Schroepfer revised that number upward by 74%. Facebook will be rolling out a new feature on Monday that will inform users who were affected by the data leak.
Meanwhile, the company said that “malicious actors” had abused a different tool to scrape from Facebook about its users. The tool allowed anyone to look up a user’s public Facebook profile information, which can include things like gender and birthdate, by searching on only the person’s phone number or email address. The feature was useful in other countries, where it may be difficult to type in a users’ full name, Shroepfer said.
But the tool was abused by bad actors, who were able to use it to easily find personal details on potentially billions of Facebook users.
“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” Shroepfer said. “So we have now disabled this feature. We’re also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well.”
Shroepfer’s post was published just an hour before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to hold a press conference with reporters.
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