Facebook goes through another scandal that shows us how little people matter to the American company, or at least how little their data matters to a corporation interested only in money.
The phone numbers and usernames of no less than 267 million Facebook accounts were exposed on the Internet in a database that could be accessed by anyone, from anywhere, without any password for protection.
This time Facebook managed to have the data of "only" 267 million people exposed on the Internet, not 400 million, as happened a few months ago, but even so, we are talking about a very big problem.
Facebook was indirectly guilty of the problem, and this because that database did not belong to it, but belonged to a third company, which extracted information from Facebook, for various purposes, but did not protect it in any way.
It is not yet known how the Facebook IDs and phone numbers of the accounts were obtained from the database created by the hackers, and it is either an exploitation of the platform or a security problem.
“Information contained in the database could be used to conduct SMS spam campaigns and phishing campaigns, among other threats to end users. It was left exposed for almost two weeks starting on December 4 and is now unavailable – but not before it was shared as a download on a hacker forum.”
Until 2018, Facebook allowed developers to access a lot of data about accounts on the platform, apparently including phone numbers, and it is possible that the data was extracted then, but quite unlikely, considering that this happened with a year ago.
Facebook has not yet declared anything about this situation, and the chances that it will do so are as small as those that problems of this kind will be solved by the American company for the future.
Considering that this is not the first time that a problem of this kind appears, it is hard to believe that Facebook will ever decide to solve these serious problems with the security of the data it has from us.
Facebook has always promised that it will keep people's data safe, that it will protect them against any situations of this kind, but it has never actually managed to do everything it keeps promising us.
