Facebook confirmed that hundreds of millions of phone numbers of users of its application has been revealed in a database accessible to anyone on the Internet, in the latest privacy problem located in the company.
Our sources revealed that more than 419 million Facebook IDs and phone numbers stored in an online server were not password-protected.
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The database contained about 133 million user records in the United States, 18 million in the United Kingdom, and 50 million in Vietnam.
The database was taken offline after this news reported to the web host, Facebook confirmed the site’s report and announced that it was investigating the time the database had been compiled and for whom.
A spokeswoman for the company said on Wednesday that the actual number of users whose information was displayed was only about 210 million.
Facebook confirmed that the data disclosed were “outdated” and would have been canceled before its policy change in April 2018.
“The dataset has been deleted and we have not seen any evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised,” the company spokeswoman said in a statement.
The spokeswoman did not answer questions about whether Facebook would notify users whose information had been leaked or provide any compensation to those affected.
Although Facebook has called the data “outdated,” phone numbers are an increasingly important key to people’s identities.
Phone numbers are not as sensitive as social security numbers, but they are important and can be used to easily obtain numerous information about the subscriber and his family from online data brokers.
