by Fox Van Allen for Techlicious
6 Million Facebook Users Have Contact Information Exposed
The latest online leak of private information comes from Facebook, as the social networking giant was forced to admit that as many as 6 million of its users had email addresses and phone numbers publicly exposed.–PC Pitstop.
If it wasn’t bad enough that the federal government has access to all your private information on the Internet, your friends may actually have access as well. Today, Facebook issued a major privacy mea culpa, admitting that private phone numbers and email addresses for 6 million of its users was inadvertently exposed.
A little-used feature on Facebook called Download Your Information (DYI) allows you to own an archival copy of all your activity on the site, including contact information for your friends. The DYI tool isn’t supposed to offer up phone numbers and email addresses that were set to private, but it appears a bug in the system did exactly that.
If there’s any consolation in the leak, it’s that this personal information was likely buried deep inside the voluminous mass of data in each DYI report, unread unless someone was specifically looking for that information. Since very few DYI reports were requested, it’s unlikely that anyone will see your contact information, even if it was accidentally downloaded by one of your Facebook friends.
This excerpt appears with the permission of Techlicious.
PC Pitstop Notes:
How Facebook Tried Burying The News Of A Massive Privacy Leak | Huffington Post | Bianca Bosker
