Details of more than 500 million Facebook users were found available on a hacker website.
The information appears to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media sites and the limits on how secure that information is.
The availability of the data set was first reported by Business Insider. According to this publication, it contains information from 106 countries, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, dates of birth and email addresses.
Facebook has been battling data security issues for years. In 2018, the social media giant disabled a feature that allowed users to search for each other via phone numbers, after revelations that the political firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed information from up to 87 million users without their knowledge or consent.
In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher reported finding a database with names, phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users – almost all based in the U.S. – on the open Internet. It is not clear whether the current data dump is related to this database.
The company based in Menlo Park, California, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement provided to other publications, Facebook said the leak was old and stemmed from a problem that was fixed in 2019.