Privacy concerns surrounding Facebook once again as they have been stored incorrectly within the data systems.
Facebook revealed on their Newsroom page that “some” users’ passwords were stored incorrectly within their internal data storage systems. The way that they were stored made them readable to the employees posing a security threat to ‘hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users’ as estimated by Facebook itself.
Although Facebook stated that no one from outside the company had access to personal data of millions of its users and that employees never abused the information given in plain text, it’s harder to trust the company each passing day. It feels that each month, we as the users have to face another and another leak of our data.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThis morning we announced an internal issue where we stored passwords incorrectly. We’ve found zero evidence that anyone outside of Facebook had access to these passwords and zero evidence of internal abuse. https://t.co/21IKC9PgOS
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) March 21, 2019
At this point it’s worth mentioning the last two big scandals that involved Facebook and it’s faulty security. First was the Cambridge Analitica data scandal, that erupted in the beginning of 2018, in which a company outside of Facebook harvested personal data of millions of Facebook clients to use it for political matters. Facebook revealed that approximately 87 million of users were affected.
Another security breach happened in September 2018 when account tokens of 30 million users were stolen. In addition to that phone numbers and email addresses of half of those were also taken. The problem didn’t end there as Facebook discovered that personal in depth data of approximately 14 million users was revealed. It included: hometown, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, people or pages they follow and 15 most recent searches.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThis is not about selling data to Cambridge Analitica. Facebook monitors user’s behavior and knows the entire FB experience is getting terrible, discussions are worthless, >70% of profiles are fake, the quality of FB-groups running downhill, etc. etc.https://t.co/u73BIXyVvr
— Elzo Smid Ontwerp (@elzosmid) March 7, 2019
Facebook still haven’t learned from their mistakes even though they made lots of them over the last year. If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t find a way to end the privacy problems that Facebook users have to face every 3-4 months it may lose even more value as the company and in the eyes of it’s users. It is already very apparent that the era of Facebook is quickly fading away as many other social media platforms gain interest while maintaining good reputation.
Now the question is not if Facebook will end but when as the generation of its veterans (that joined soon after the release in 2004) grew up and the hype factor disappeared. The company is certainly not helping itself with scandals like the latest one caused entirely by stupidity and carelessness.
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