Facebook has wrongly exposed the phones of 400 million users

Phone numbers linked to more than 400 million Facebook accounts were stored online and were accessible to anyone, which meant a new mistake by the US group, which again had data protection issues.

The information was provided by the TechCrunch specialist site, which indicated that a vulnerable server was storing 419 million user records from the world's largest social network in multiple databases, of which 133 million belong to United States accounts, more than 50 million in Vietnam and 18 million in Great Britain.

The databases have retained the identity of Facebook users – a unique combination of numbers for each account – as well as the phone numbers badociated with the profiles, the gender of the users of certain accounts and the geographical location.

The server in question was not pbadword protected, which meant everyone could access the databases. He was still online Wednesday night, when TechCrunch contacted the host.

>> Read more: giant fine for Facebook for providing user data for campaigns

Meanwhile, Facebook has partially confirmed the information provided by TechCrunch, but downplayed the incident by ensuring that the number of accounts confirmed so far represents about half of the number cited.

The group added that many of these recordings were copies and the data was old. "This dataset has been removed and we have not seen any sign that Facebook accounts have been compromised," said a spokesman for the social network at AFP.

This is not the first time that Facebook has problems with the processing of personal data from your accounts. Late last July, the Federal Trade Commission – a kind of consumer advocacy agency – imposed a $ 5,000 million fine on Facebook for failing to effectively protect the personal data of its users.

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018, which revealed the use of millions of Facebook users for political purposes without their knowledge, the group eliminated a feature allowing them to search on the platform with phone numbers.

Putting their phone numbers online exposes users to receiving unsolicited calls or being hacked by "hijacking" the SIM card, as was the case recently for Twitter's boss, Jack Dorsey.