Social Media

Personal data of 533 million Facebook users leaked online

By Sarah Abraham
Social media giant Facebook wins preliminary approval for settlement of facial recognition lawsuit

Personal data of 533 million Facebook user’s was reportedly leaked online for free, according to security researcher Alon Gal. An insider reported that several of the leaked records were verified by themselves.

According to Insider, the leaked data contains personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India.

“It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses,” revealed the Insider.

The number 533 million might sound familiar to many of us as information is apparently from the same dataset that people could pay for portions of using a Telegram bot. This was reported by Motherboard in January. Now it seems you can have this data without paying anything at all.

Facebook told Insider that this data was discarded because of a vulnerability that is fixed in 2019. The company told BleepingComputer that it is old data that was previously reported in 2019.

Troy Hunt, the creator of the Have I Been Pwned database found on Saturday that in the data only about 2.5 million unique email addresses (which is still a lot!), but apparently the greatest impact here is the phone numbers.

Tags: Facebook leaked online

Sarah Abraham

Sarah Abraham is a graduate in Journalism - Mass Media. A media enthusiast who has a stronghold on communication and content writing. She is committed to high-quality research and writing. Sarah is currently working as an aspiring journalist at USAnewshour.com and can be reached at sarahabrahamk1011@gmail.com.