Facebook’s, Europe’s top data protection regulator in the European Union, is seeking answers from technology giants over a major data breach reported over the weekend. The breach reported by Business Insider on Saturday, stating that the personal information of more than 500 million Facebook accounts (including email addresses and mobile phone numbers) posted on a low-level hacking forum – creating personal information for millions of Facebook users. Accounts are available free of charge.
Business Insider noted, “The published data contains the personal information of 533M Facebook users in 106 countries, including 32M records in the United States, 11M users in the UK and 6M users in India,” Business Insider said by phone number, Facebook ID, full name, location, Includes date of birth, BIOS and some email addresses. Facebook responded to the data dump report by saying it related to a weakness in its platform – dubbing “old data”, that it claimed published in 2019. According to Facebook’s initial response, it is not clear whether all the data is “old”.
There are good reasons to try to downplay another Facebook data fraud. Not least, there are strict penalties for companies under EU data protection regulations that fail immediately report significant violations to the relevant authorities. In addition, indeed for the violations they – such as the Block General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) design and the expectation of protection by default.
The leaked information claims to be “old” and is hopeful that Facebook may realize the idea of predicting the arrival before this GDPR application (May 2018). The DPC’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle said in a statement, “The newly released dataset appears to be integrated with the original 2018 (pre-GDPR) dataset and will be combined with additional records that may be available later.” “A significant number of users are EU users. Most of the data from Facebook’s public profiles seems to be scrapped, “he added.
“Previous datasets were published in 2019 and 2018 regarding large-scale scraping of Facebook websites which suggested Facebook to close the vulnerabilities in its phone lock functionality that occurred between June 2017 and April 2018. Scrapping occurred before GDPR Chose not to report personal data infringement.”
Doyle said the regulator tried to establish “complete information” about Facebook’s violations on a weekly basis and “continued to do so” – making it clear that there was a lack of clarity on the matter despite acknowledging the violations. The DPC also made it clear that the GDPR had put pressure on companies specifically inform regulators about data security issues, despite the fact that no practical contact made on Facebook. Instead the regulator had to go to Facebook – using.
