In a surprising decision, Facebook does not plan to notify you if your personal data was exposed in its latest security hole.
During the weekend it was announced that more than 533 million phone numbers and personal data of Facebook users had been leaked, and although it was thought that Facebook would have to warn to affected users to be aware of future attacks against their data, it seems that those responsible for the social network have made another decision.
And it is that sensitive user data such as phone numbers, Facebook identifiers, full names, locations, dates of birth, biographies and even email addresses have been discovered in a publicly accessible hacker forum, and that is a big problem because although there is no bank information or passwords, cybercriminals could use social engineering to extract the rest of the data for years to come.
In a surprising decision move, a Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that the company “does not plan to notify users whose data was exposed .” Facebook itself has pointed out to Reuters that there are two reasons why they consider it unnecessary to notify users: one of the reasons is that they are not entirely clear which users would need to be notified and on the other that users cannot do anything at all the data is already publicly available.
Last Tuesday, Facebook pointed out on its blog that it believes that the data was extracted through its contact importer sometime before September 2019, so the data would have been in the hands of cybercriminals for a long time despite the fact that now this database has been made public. The social network claims that they have made changes to the contact importer and that they have already plugged the security hole.
At the moment we advise you to check if you have been a victim of this great leak of personal data from Facebook through the free tool Have I Been Pwned?