Phone Numbers of 419 million Facebook users Exposed

Phone Numbers of 419 million Facebook users Exposed

Phone Numbers of 419 million Facebook users Exposed by database publically accessible. Tech giant Facebook was again embroiled in contention after finding millions of user phone numbers in a database accessible to all. According to TechCrunch, the database contains records of over 419 million Facebook users worldwide, with 133 million US, 18 million UK and 50 million Vietnamese users.

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While the records were collected on the database through a tool that social media website disabled years ago, the online database was now taken offline after the publication reached out to the web host.

Phone Numbers of 419 million Facebook users Exposed

Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer, addressed the issue of the website’s abuse tool in a blog post dated 4 April 2019: “Malicious actors also abused these features by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery,” he said.

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“Because of the scale and sophistication of the activity that we have seen, we believe that most people on Facebook could have scraped their public profile in this way. So this feature has now been disabled,” he added.

Regarding the debacle, Facebook replied: “This data set is old and seems to have been obtained before we made changes last year to remove the ability of people to find others using their phone numbers.”

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