Facebook has accidentally exposed telephone and e-mail addresses of 6 million users of the social network. The information may have been accessed by unauthorized persons during the past year, the company announced Friday. Facebook said that the leaks began in 2012 due to a technical problem occurring in its huge archive containing contact information collected from the 1.1 billion users of the social network worldwide.
Because of this problem, Facebook users who downloaded contact data about people they had on their friends list received additional information that they were not supposed to have. Facebook security team was alerted to the problem last week and fixed it within 24 hours. Facebook did not publish this information until Friday afternoon, when it posted an explanatory message on its official blog.
A Facebook spokesman said the delay in making this public was caused by the procedures that the social network has to follow: the authorities and affected users must be notified before the 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,” reads the official announcement.
Even though the technical problems have been fixed, Facebook officials said: “It’s still something we’re upset and embarrassed by, and we’ll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again.”
Large groups of internet providers were faced lately with users distrust after revelations of Edward Snowden, a former consultant to the National Security Agency (NSA), according to whom the companies provided personal data under the intelligence program PRISM.
Companies including Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo, have denied allegations that NSA would have direct access to their servers. According to the U.S. authorities, the program was designed to help prevent the occurrence of terrorist attacks.
In this context, Facebook recently revealed that it has received from the U.S. authorities in the second half of 2012, between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for information about users, adding that it didn’t consistently comply with these requests. Investigators’ requests for information were based on facts ranging from missing children to alleged terrorist threats, to petty crimes. The number of accounts covered varies between 18,000 and 19,000 in the same period of last six months of 2012, Facebook said, without disclosing how many times it responded to those requests.
Facebook has also given assurances that it protects “aggressively” information about its users, giving assurances that it strictly conforms to what the law requires.
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