Facebook Inc has inadvertently
exposed 6 million users' phone
numbers and email addresses to
unauthorised viewers over the past
year, the world's largest social
networking company disclosed late
Friday.
Facebook blamed the data leaks,
which began in 2012, on a technical
glitch in its massive archive of contact
information collected from its 1.1
billion users worldwide. As a result of
the glitch, Facebook users who
downloaded contact data for their list
of friends obtained additional
information that they were not
supposed to have.
Facebook's security team was alerted
to the bug last week and fixed it within
24 hours. But Facebook did not
publicly acknowledge the bug until
Friday afternoon, when it published an
"important message" on its blog
explaining the issue.
A Facebook spokesman said the delay
was due to company procedure
stipulating that regulators and affected
users be notified before making a
public announcement.
"We currently have no evidence that
this bug has been exploited
maliciously and we have not received
complaints from users or seen
anomalous behaviour on the tool or
site to suggest wrongdoing," Facebook
said on its blog.
While the privacy breach was limited,
"it's still something we're upset and
embarrassed by, and we'll work
doubly hard to make sure nothing like
this happens again," it added.
The breach follows recent disclosures
that several consumer Internet
companies turned over troves of user
data to a large-scale electronic
surveillance program run by U.S.
intelligence.
The companies include Facebook,
Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc
and Yahoo Inc.
The companies, led by Facebook,
successfully negotiated with the U.S.
government last week to reveal the
approximate number of user
information requests that each
company had received, including
secret national security orders.
Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013
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