The personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users has been found on low-level piracy websites.
Published data, first reported by Business Insider, included phone numbers, full names, locations, dates of birth and email addresses of 533 million users.
The information is made up of people from more than 100 counties, including 32 million user registrations in the US, 11 million users in the UK and 6 million users in India.
Insider reported that it verified the data by matching the numbers of Facebook users on its page with the data set.
According to the media, the data are several years old.
A spokesman for the social media platform said the information had been deleted after a vulnerability was hit the site in 2019.
The Hill has contacted Facebook for comments.
The latest revelation about data is the latest example of the challenges the social media company faces in terms of user data and privacy.
In 2018, the platform got rid of a feature that allowed users to search for “friends” using their personal phone numbers after verifying that Cambridge Analytica could access that information.
According to a report by The Associated Press, about 87 million Facebook users at the time had compromised their personal information.
A Ukrainian security researcher found a similar database of phone numbers and unique user identifiers of more than 267 million Facebook users in 2019. Most of these users were in the United States, it reported. AP.
It is currently unclear whether this database is related to the latest findings.
“This is old data that was previously reported in 2019,” Facebook told AP. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”