Security News > 2021 > April > Would be so cool if everyone normalized these pesky data leaks, says data-leaking Facebook in leaked memo

Facebook wants you to believe that the scraping of 533 million people's personal data from its platform, and the dumping of that data online by nefarious people, is something to be "Normalised."

A blundering Facebook public relations operative managed to send a journalist a copy an internal document detailing the antisocial network's strategy for containing the leaking of 533 million accounts - and what the memo contained was infuriating though unsurprising.

Miscreants had helped themselves to 70GB of names, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, and more from people's Facebook profiles, thanks to a security weakness in the platform.

The Belgian journalist also pointed out that Facebook's claims that the data-leaking vulnerability only existed during 2019 may have been untrue: two years before that date, a bug hunter called Inti de Ceukelaire wrote about uncovering private phone numbers uploaded to Facebook - and also wrote that Facebook's security team dismissed his findings, saying "It doesn't expose any additional user information which wasn't already public."

"As LinkedIn and Clubhouse have shown, data scraping is an industry-wide challenge which we are committed to tackling and educating users about. We understand people's concerns, which is why we continue to strengthen our systems to make scraping from Facebook without our permission more difficult and go after the people behind it."

According to the email, Facebook execs want their website to be seen as something that sits above little people like governments and regulators.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/04/20/facebook_data_breach/