Over 533 Facebook Users Have Had Their Personal Data, Including Phone Numbers Leaked

Personal data of millions of Facebook users, including full names, birthdays, phone numbers, locations and email addresses were released on Saturday on a shady website for hackers. 533 million users from 106 countries have had their privacy compromised in this leak. 32 million users in the US, 11 million in the UK and 6 million in India.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, Liz Shepherd, the data leak is an old occurrence that has been reported and fixed since 2009. This however doesn't stop the data from being used for fraudulent purposes as it is still exposed and accessible to anyone with basic data skills. Internet fraud and impersonation is at an all-time high and this data can prove very useful to scammers.

This is not the first time that data from the social network has been leaked on the internet.

267 million Facebook user IDs, names and phone numbers were leaked in December 2019. A year before, in 2018, Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic communication firm, was exposed for invading privacy and collecting the personal data of up to 87 million users. Facebook was fined the sum of $5 billion for violations of data privacy laws by the FTC(Federal Trade Commission) afterward.