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.
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