Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, wrote on Wednesday that he believes most users on Facebook could have had their public profile data harvested by third parties—one of the many revelations and announcements the company has made this week as it tries to explain itself to the public in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analaytica scandal, and one that was easy to overlook. The comment was nestled in a description of a Facebook feature that allowed users to search for other users via someone’s phone number or email address, which Facebook says has been abused by malicious hackers that would scour Facebook using lists of emails and phone numbers they already had to find and then harvest users’ public profile information. Schroepfer said this feature has now been disabled, but also noted that “given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way.”
from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2q98Jnw
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