These days on the internet many websites ask for personal data like IDs and passwords from users upon signing up and that sometimes leads to data leakage and security breaches. Same is the thing with Facebook, one of the most used social media apps in the world with billions of users worldwide; has more than once found itself in hot water with accusations of selling user data to third-party companies.
Pretty much the same thing happened this week when Meta formerly known as Facebook Inc. was fined 18.6 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission which is also known as DPC. They were fined because of many data and privacy breaches. Also, because Facebook has a reputation for leaking information this news did not come as a surprise to many users.
DPC is the main organization that regulates the data for Facebook in Europe; so when they received the news of 12 Data breaches in only six months but this data is more than almost 5 years old. This data was received during June 2018 till December 2018. The breach affected over 30 million users and an investigation was launched by the DPC after receiving the news of these data breaches.
The most major breach was in 2018 when data such as passwords and usernames from the Account Access Tokens was hacked and 30 million users got their passwords stolen, thus as a result their account was at risk of being hacked all because of a small bug that appeared back in 2017 that Facebook couldn’t be bothered to fix. But that wasn’t all as another major security breach in the form of another bug which automatically changed the user’s privacy settings from private to public resulting in the sharing of people’s private content with strangers;now this bug impacted about 14 million users in a negative way. Some other breaches were also in the form of bugs as in November of the same year another one was found which gave away user’s information to websites without the user’s consent or even their knowledge. The second one was found in December 2018 and was called the Photo API bug which gave websites access to more than 5.6 million user’s photos. Which was not only a major breach of privacy but it was also one of consent.
To sum it all up, Facebook has seen too many of these incidents to be considered a coincidence and the year 2018 was the primary year in which the trust of the users was lifted from Facebook.
Read next: NFTs may soon be coming to Instagram and may help in building of the Metaverse
Pretty much the same thing happened this week when Meta formerly known as Facebook Inc. was fined 18.6 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission which is also known as DPC. They were fined because of many data and privacy breaches. Also, because Facebook has a reputation for leaking information this news did not come as a surprise to many users.
DPC is the main organization that regulates the data for Facebook in Europe; so when they received the news of 12 Data breaches in only six months but this data is more than almost 5 years old. This data was received during June 2018 till December 2018. The breach affected over 30 million users and an investigation was launched by the DPC after receiving the news of these data breaches.
The most major breach was in 2018 when data such as passwords and usernames from the Account Access Tokens was hacked and 30 million users got their passwords stolen, thus as a result their account was at risk of being hacked all because of a small bug that appeared back in 2017 that Facebook couldn’t be bothered to fix. But that wasn’t all as another major security breach in the form of another bug which automatically changed the user’s privacy settings from private to public resulting in the sharing of people’s private content with strangers;now this bug impacted about 14 million users in a negative way. Some other breaches were also in the form of bugs as in November of the same year another one was found which gave away user’s information to websites without the user’s consent or even their knowledge. The second one was found in December 2018 and was called the Photo API bug which gave websites access to more than 5.6 million user’s photos. Which was not only a major breach of privacy but it was also one of consent.
To sum it all up, Facebook has seen too many of these incidents to be considered a coincidence and the year 2018 was the primary year in which the trust of the users was lifted from Facebook.
Read next: NFTs may soon be coming to Instagram and may help in building of the Metaverse