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The Facebook privacy scandal continues to get worse. What started as one impropriety with the Cambridge Analytica, a political data analytics company, has peeled the skin back on an even uglier situation. The original scandal was said to have affected approximately 50 million Facebook users and allowed their personal information to be susceptible to being mined. Facebook has revealed that Cambridge Analytica probably had access to data of as many as 87 million users. Now the social network is admitting that “most” of their users could have had their personal data scraped by another privacy failure.
On Wednesday, Facebook revealed that the scraping of personal data of their users is far, far more widespread than they have ever acknowledged. In a blog post, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, confessed that “most” of the 2 billion users of the social media giant could have had their data hacked by “malicious actors.” “Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” the blog stated. “So we have now disabled this feature. We’re also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well.”
“It is reasonable to expect that if you’ve had that setting on in the last several years that someone has accessed your information,” Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. Facebook said the data skimming was done by using the site’s search function, but it had disabled the feature, which would eliminate the vulnerability. Bad actors could piece together the personal data stolen from Facebook profiles and then use it for identity theft or credit card fraud.
Facebook implemented new security features and actually broke Tinder for some users. After the update, some Tinder users were kicked off the dating app and they were unable to log back in no matter what they did. The new tweak caused the Facebook login on the Tinder app to have an error. Tinder users were subjected to an infinite loop of failed logins. Tinder uses a Facebook account to log in and that’s why the error between the two social media platforms occurred.
Facebook’s API changes just broke Tinder. It throws you into an endless login loop. Bravo to Facebook for being considerate of their only valuable product. pic.twitter.com/QbJA1uTi0v
— Daniel Sinclair (@_DanielSinclair) April 4, 2018
Last week, there was a report that Facebook harvested intricate details of phone calls and text messages from Android smartphones. Facebook is definitely not having a good last few weeks.