Social-Media
If you're one of the 533 million people whose data was leaked, Facebook isn't going to tell you.
Facebook is reacting to the recent reports that data from 533 million accounts was leaked online for free, but not in the way users would have hoped: a Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that the company does not intend to inform users whose data was exposed online.
There seems to be a ton of details in the dataset that you don't want floating around the internet — birthdays, addresses, full names, and phone numbers, for example — so it's frustrating to learn that Facebook has no plans to alert users that might be impacted. According to Reuters, the company has two reasons for not informing users ahead of time: It claims it is unsure how it will know which users will need to be excluded.The company told Reuters that it isn't informing users ahead of time for two reasons: it isn't sure it will know the users need to be updated, and users wouldn't be able to do anything about the data being online.
Facebook said on its blog on Tuesday that it "believes" the data was scraped using its contact importer before September 2019, which is against the company's policies. However, as BuzzFeed News writer Ryan Mac points out, this contradicts the company's silence or lack of legal action against notorious surveillance firm Clearview AI for scraping images from Instagram and Facebook.
Just saw this explanation from Facebook about the data leak, which interestingly claims it's focused on protecting people because "scraping data" is against its terms of service.
— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) April 7, 2021
That's funny because FB has done nothing about Clearview AI scraping photos.https://t.co/K1vGX6icD6 pic.twitter.com/U43apTh2yP
To stop the scraping, Facebook says it has "made changes to the touch importer."
If you're worried about whether or not your information was included in the data dump and don't want to wait for Facebook to change its mind about notifying users, check out our guide on how to find out whether you were affected. Also, read Wired's article on Facebook's inconsistent messages for more information on the data set and the company's lack of accountability.
A request for comment from Facebook has gone unanswered.
