Security News > 2021 > December > Facebook to Pay Hackers for Reporting Data Scraping Bugs and Scraped Datasets

Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, has announced that it's expanding its bug bounty program to start rewarding valid reports of scraping vulnerabilities across its platforms as well as include reports of scraping data sets that are available online.

To that end, the social media giant aims to monetarily compensate for valid reports of scraping bugs in its service and identify unprotected or openly public databases containing no less than 100,000 unique Facebook user records with personally identifiable information such as email, phone number, physical address, religious, or political affiliation.

The only caveat is that the reported data set must be unique and not previously known.

Should the requisite criteria be met, the company said it will take appropriate measures, including legal actions, to remove the data from the non-Meta website.

Reports concerning scraped databases will be rewarded through matched charity donations of the researchers' choosing.

The move to curb unauthorized scraping, a technique referring to the practice of extracting data from websites, comes as part of the company's efforts to limit abuse of people's data on its platform in the wake of the infamous Cambridge Analytica data scandal that resulted in the personal information belonging to millions of Facebook users harvested without their consent for political advertising.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2021/12/facebook-to-pay-hackers-for-reporting.html