Researchers at cybersecurity company UpGuard report that they have uncovered millions of Facebook user posts inadvertently hosted on Amazon's cloud servers. Similar incidents have happened before, and last year there was a major scandal involving an app from Cambridge Analytica that collected user data under the guise of a harmless quiz.
Experts believe that since then the necessary work has not been carried out to improve the security of information stored by Facebook. It's hard to say how long the databases were stored on Amazon's servers, and who might have had access to them. The researchers report that after contacting Facebook, the user information found was deleted.
In the first database, Mexico City-based Cultura Colectiva stored about 540 million Facebook user records, including personal identifiers, comments, reviews, and others. The database was removed after Bloomberg representatives contacted Facebook and reported the problem. The second database was part of a long-disused social networking application. It contained the names, passwords, and email addresses of 22 users. It's likely that this database got on Amazon's servers by mistake, but the problem still raises questions about where user data collected by Facebook applications goes.
Source: 3dnews.ru