The personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users was found on low-level hacker sites.
The posted data, reported for the first time by Business Insider, included phone numbers, full names, locations, dates of birth and email addresses for 533 million users.
The information covers people from more than 100 counties, including 32 million user records in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom and 6 million users in India.
Insider reported that he verified the data by comparing the numbers of Facebook users on his pages with the data set.
The data is several years old, according to the media.
A spokesman for the social media platform said the information was stolen after a vulnerability was fixed on the site in 2019.
The Hill contacted Facebook for comment.
The latest data disclosure is the latest example of the challenges that the social media company faces in terms of data and user privacy.
In 2018, the platform got rid of a feature that allowed users to search for “friends” using their personal phone numbers after discovering that Cambridge Analytica was able to access that information.
Nearly 87 million Facebook users at the time had their personal information compromised, according to a report by The Associated Press.
A Ukrainian security researcher found a similar database of phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users in 2019. Most of those users were in the United States, AP reported.
It is currently unclear whether this database is related to the most recent findings.
“These are old data that were reported earlier in 2019,” said Facebook to the AP. “We found and fixed this problem in August 2019.”