This is not Facebook’s first privacy transgression, of course. Understandably, Facebook users have responded with frustration. What was the Response to the Facebook Data Breach? This breached data may be old, but the personal details shared are still a clear violation of privacy. While the hole was patched back in 2019, the data had clearly leaked before that was fixed. When asked about the data breach, Facebook confirmed that the cause was a vulnerability in a previous build of their platform. The information of users spanning 106 countries was given out for free by the original poster, and included names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and more. The range of users affected was global, and the accuracy of the information was verified by Business Insider, confirming that the breach was legitimate. A user in a forum published the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users. On April 3, 2021, it was revealed that a major data breach had occurred within Facebook. Here’s everything you need to know about Facebook’s April 2021 data breach. Worryingly, the breach has not been treated with urgency by Facebook higher-ups, leading to backlash from the cybersecurity community, as well as from regulatory authorities tasked with upholding privacy laws. A hole in their security led to a leak of over 500 million Facebook users’ data. They’re dangerous, irresponsible, at best half-truths designed to enable it to get away with it, as it does again and again.For most of April, Facebook has received negative attention for a major data breach. And the “facts” Facebook published this week about the data breach aren’t. The US Congress has finally woken up to the danger of disinformation, but the disinformation from Facebook about Facebook is toxic and continues unabated – from its shiny new Oversight Board, a $130m exercise in evading responsibility, to the estimated $7m a year it invests in its own pet Lord Haw Haw, aka Sir Nick Clegg. But will it? Enforcements are hard, regulators respond to pressure, and in a news cycle that every day brings fresh new reports of Facebook enabling Nazis or driving teenagers to suicide, this story barely broke through. The Irish Data Protection Commission could act. But so what? It’ll take years and anyway, it’s only money. There will be mass class actions that arise from this breach. Even where there are laws, it operates above them. It’s this culture of impunity that makes Facebook such a dangerous company. What do you do when a trillion-dollar company with 2.8 billion users treats the public with brazen contempt? When it won’t answer basic journalistic inquiries? When it ignores even the regulator? Ireland’s Data Protection Commission – its lead regulator in Europe – released a pointed statement saying that it received “no proactive communication” from Facebook. It later confirmed that it had no intention of informing users because it wasn’t “confident” who they were, users “could not fix the issue”, and anyway, “the data was publicly available”. Instead it published a blogpost, The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data, saying it wasn’t hacked, the data was “scraped”. At an impromptu event on the data breach, journalists from Wired, Politico and Business Insider revealed that it refused to answer their questions too. It passes “exclusive” scoops to favourite reporters, and stonewalls the rest. ![]() ![]() It uses silence to throttle reporting, a strategy that works. On Tuesday morning I submitted a set of questions to its press office: when was the issue first discovered? Did Facebook inform the regulators (as it is required to under US, UK and EU law)? If so, when? Had it informed users? But Facebook didn’t respond. These are the actions of a company that knows it can get away with it. The news of the latest breach, of 533 million people’s data, dropped over a holiday weekend Facebook responded only by saying it was “old data” and the problem had been “found and fixed in August 2019” – an absurd statement given that the data had only just been dumped on the internet, and clearly that hadn’t been fixed at all. That impunity was in full sight this week. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs.
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