Facebook blames latest personal data exposure on third-party developers
Here we go again. The personal data of a large number of Facebook users has once again been made publicly available, including passwords. For once, however, it would seem that the blame is not on Mark Zuckerberg's social network.
Since the Cambridge Analytica case took hold, Facebook is not going through its best historical period. The eyes of the press, users, computer security experts and politicians are on the world's most popular social network and not a day goes by without some of the skeletons in the company's closet being unearthed.
This time, however, the data of thousands of users has not been leaked on the network due to the negligence of Facebook but due to two third-party developers. The problem? These app and game developers had uploaded thousands of pieces of data to a publicly accessible Amazon AWS server.
The largest of the two datasets, from Cultivated Culture, has about 540 million records and weighs over 146GB. It includes names and other data that can be used to identify users as well as their navigation history. The other backup is smaller but contains even more important data sets such as 22,000 passwords required to access an app called “At the pool”.
It is not yet certain whether anyone has been able to get hold of and use this data or for how long these files have been accessible. Facebook was, this time, quick to contact the two developers forcing them to remove this data. The behavior of the developers is, in fact, contrary to the agreements between Facebook and the developers themselves.
Of course, this is a mistake on the part of the developers but the most worrying thing, citing the UpGuard experts, is that this shows that Facebook data is no longer under its control. This is a big problem.
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