A new scandal erupts around Facebook. This time the speech that the social network was asking some new users for password information for their email. This allowed the system to access the contact list and upload the data to its servers. Reportedly, this has been working since May 2016, that is, for almost three years. Facebook said the unauthorized data collection was not planned. It should be noted that during this time the data of 1,5 million users were downloaded.
“We found that in some cases, people's email contacts were also inadvertently uploaded to Facebook when their account was created. We estimate that up to 1,5 million email contacts could be downloaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone, and we are deleting them," the press service of the social network said.
The company clarified that it had already contacted the users from whose mail contacts were downloaded. And this, I must say, is becoming a bad tradition for the company. Electronic Frontier Foundation security expert Bennett Cyphers told Business Insider in early April that the practice was almost indistinguishable from a phishing attack.
At the same time, users could only learn about data loading if they saw a pop-up window with a notification about importing data. At the same time, the social network said that they did not read the correspondence of users. Note that initially the company claimed that this feature only confirms the account, but on Wednesday Facebook confirmed to Gizmodo that in this way the system could still suggest friends and offer targeted advertising.
Thus, this is another puncture in the Facebook security system. Previously on Amazon Public Servers 146 GB of data on 540 million social network users. And earlier repeated data leaks, including through Cambridge Analytica.
Source: 3dnews.ru