Another 540 Million Facebook Users’ Data Has Been Exposed

The companys history of porous data sharing continues to haunt both it and us on the regular.

On Wednesday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm UpGuard shared that they found two massive troves of exposed Facebook user data that had been posted publicly on Amazon cloud servers.The scope of this particular privacy foul from Facebook is tremendous: More than 540 million user records were sitting in plain sight, available to anyone who found them.

Despite being contacted in January by both Amazon and UpGuard, Cultura Colectiva didnt move to take down the data until Wednesday, when Bloomberg contacted Facebook about the findings.

Facebook is currently in the midst of multiple federal investigations over the Cambridge Analytica scandal that came to a boil about a year ago when it was reported that the voter targeting firm had inappropriately accessed the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users. That led to Facebook suspending hundreds of apps from accessing the social media network, as well as a raft of new privacy rules that restrict how app developers are now allowed to access Facebook user data, but it has not stopped the drip-drip of news that the companys years of loose habits had come with breach after breach after breach.

Not to mention that it was less than two weeks ago that Brian Krebs reported that Facebook had been storing the passwords of hundreds of millions of Facebook users in plain text accessible to more than 20,000 Facebook employees to see. And it was only last September that Facebook shared its discovery of evidence of a security breach that hit 30 million usersthe largest hack in the companys history.The numbers of people affected by Facebooks privacy blunders are so large its nearly impossible to wrap your head around them: 87 million, 30 million, 540 millionthe list goes on.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Author: April Glaser

Online magazine of news, politics, technology, and culture. Combines humor and insight in thoughtful analyses of current events and political news.

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