The social media giant Facebook did not notify the more than 530 million users whose details were obtained through the misuse of a feature before 2019 and recently made public in a database, as reported by Reuters.
On April 4th 2021, 533 million Facebook users’ phone number has been leaked on a popular hacker forum for free. The sold data included 533,313,128 Facebook users, with information such as a member’s mobile number, Facebook ID, name, gender, location, relationship status, occupation, date of birth, and email addresses.
The Facebook spokesman said Reuters that the social media company was not confident it had full visibility on which users would need to be notified. He said it also took into account that users could not fix the issue and that the data was publicly available in deciding not to notify users. Facebook has said it plugged the hole after identifying the problem at the time.
The scraped information did not include financial information, health information or passwords, Facebook said. However, the collated data could provide valuable information for hacks or other abuses.
To check if the Facebook leak included your email address or phone number, you can visit Have I Been Pwned and enter your email address or phone number in the search field. Once you click the ‘pwned?’ button, a list of all the data breaches the email was exposed to will be displayed.
