Skip to Content
Silicon Valley

More than half a billion Facebook records were left exposed on the public internet

The records were removed yesterday, but it’s yet another example of Facebook users’ data being mishandled. And it’s not even the only Facebook data scandal this week.

The sources: The data came from two apps, both of which were able to access Facebook data on users and their friends under rules that Facebook says it has since tightened up. One, a Mexican digital publisher called Cultura Colectiva, openly stored 540 million records, including comments, names, likes, and reactions to posts, in a publicly accessible database hosted by Amazon Web Services. The other was a now-defunct app called At the Pool, aimed at introducing you to potential new friends. It listed names, passwords, and e-mail addresses for 22,000 people. UpGuard, the Australian security firm that discovered the records, said it couldn’t tell how long the data had been exposed. Both databases were closed after Facebook notified Amazon, according to Bloomberg.

A reminder: This is just one of many Facebook data breaches revealed in the last year. It stems from Facebook’s willingness in previous years to hand over masses of data to third-party developers, a practice that got it into serious trouble in the case of Cambridge Analytica. It insists it’s tightened up data security since. But it raises a question: How much Facebook user data is still floating about, potentially in unsecure servers? There’s no way to tell, so don’t be surprised if this specific issue recurs (as it has done repeatedly so far).

Security headaches: Just yesterday Facebook was forced to stop asking users for their e-mail passwords to verify new accounts, after criticism that it’s poor practice to do so. And last month it turned out Facebook had been storing hundreds of millions of users’ passwords in plain text, another major security no-no.

Sign up here to our daily newsletter The Download to get your dose of the latest must-read news from the world of emerging tech.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments.

Faults in a certain part of the immune system might be at the root of some long covid cases, new research suggests.

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.