SOCIAL_LEAKS!

FACEBOOK ADMITS YEAR-LONG DATA BREACH EXPOSED 6 MILLION USERS

SAN FRANCISCO:
Facebook Inc has
inadvertently exposed 6 million users' phone
numbers and email addresses to unauthorized 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 behavior 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.