How to check if your data is included in the latest Facebook violation

After initially revealing its latest data breach last month, Facebook yesterday offered more details to users. The social network revealed that hackers had obtained data from some 30 million users. Although this number is lower than the original estimate of 50 million users, it still represents an alarming number of people.

Here's how to check if your data has been included in the latest Facebook violation.

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Details of the Facebook Fault:

Facebook explains that the vulnerability is related to the "View as" feature, which allows users to view their profile as others see it. Due to security failure, hackers were able to obtain data such as:

User name, sex, location / language, relationship status, religion, hometown, current city declared, date of birth, types of devices used to access Facebook, education, at work, at the last 10 places in which they logged in or tagged, website, people or the pages they follow and the 15 most recent searches.

Facebook adds that the 14 million users, hackers could get a lot, if not all of the aforementioned data. For 15 million additional users, hackers got the name and contact information.

The vulnerability that pirates enjoyed existed for more than a year, from July 2017 to September 2018.

How to check if your information has been included in Facebook violation

If you want to know if your information has been included in the Facebook violation, the company indicates that it is sending notifications to the affected users during the "next few days".

If you do not want to wait for this notification – or do not trust Facebook to avoid making mistakes in your contacts – here is another solution.
Simply go to this web page and make sure you are signed in to your Facebook account. Scroll down and you'll see a section called "Is my Facebook account affected by this security issue?" From there, Facebook will explain if your data has been accessed by hackers.

For example, here is the message I see for my Facebook account:

Based on what we have learned so far, your Facebook account has not been affected by this security incident. If we discover that more Facebook accounts have been affected, we will reset their access tokens and notify these accounts.

Although the 30 million affected users are below Facebook's initial estimates, the company adds that it did not exclude the "possibility of smaller attacks", which means that this number could increase as the investigation will continue.

If you're still worried about Facebook's ongoing security issues, check out our guide to disabling or deleting your account.

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