Is Your Email Address Among the 533 Million in a Facebook Breach? Find out here.

Over the weekend, news broke that a hacker had posted a database online containing the personal information of 533 million Facebook users, including email and physical addresses, phone numbers. , dates of birth and more. With data stolen in a breach in 2019 and Facebook plugged that hole a long time ago, this is the first time this huge treasure has been made available for free.

If you have a Facebook account (or if you had one in 2019 that you disabled), you should be concerned. And now you can find out if your private information has been made very public.

Have I Been Pwned ?, a site that allows users to search databases from dozens of violations, added the Facebook dataset to its collection. Go to the site’s home page and enter the addresses you use with Facebook to see if they’re included. And yes, it is safe to do so. Have I Been Pwned is a well-established site and its operator, Troy Hunt, is Microsoft’s regional manager in Austaila.

The site also lets you search if your password was found in a data breach, and since Facebook data includes phone numbers, Hunt debated whether to add a phone number search.

There are issues with this, not least of which are allowing spammers and scammers to confirm phone numbers as real. As Hunt points out in the tweet above, a thief could get their hands on Facebook’s entire breach database and associate names with confirmed phone numbers. Personally, I voted NO in his poll.

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