Not 50 Million, Not 87 Million... Facebook Admits Data From 'Most' Of Its 2 Billion Users Co
Image Credit: Freshest FM
Original Article | Author: Jessica Corbett
Buried in Facebook's announcement that Cambridge Analytica had improperly gathered data from up to 87 million users—rather than the previously reported 50 million—was the stunning admission that "malicious actors" exploited the social networking site's search features to collection information from "most" of its 2 billion users.
The detail was pointed out on Twitter by Wired journalist Matt Burgess, among others:
"Until today, people could enter another person's phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them," Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer wrote in a company blog post on Wednesday. "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. So we have now disabled this feature."
In other words, Facebook leadership believes that over the course of several years, these "malicious actors" utilized the now-disabled search features to collect whatever personal information that most of its users had sometimes unknowingly set to "public."
