Facebook Faces More Privacy Leaks Anew
Social network giant Facebook is in hot water over privacy leaks yet again. It was reported that a Facebook staff had access to passwords for years, affecting almost 600 million users. These passwords were reportedly stored in plain text, when they should be stored in a way that masks the text and is therefore unreadable to employees. Facebook has assured its users that the passwords were stored on internal company servers, and is inaccessible to people outside of the company. “We [have] not found any cases so far in our investigations where someone was looking intentionally for passwords, nor have we found signs of misuse of this data,” Facebook software engineer Scott Renfro stated.
This privacy breach is not an isolated incident for Facebook. Just last year, over 100,000 Aussies were exposed in a massive cyberattack on the social media platform, providing hackers with users’ personal information and in some cases, location and online activities. Facebook had private correspondence with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) regarding the incident, which was then made public through a freedom of information (FOI) request. Facebook’s legal team have said that they “do not consider the incident to be an eligible data breach under the Australian Notifiable Data Breaches scheme”. Facebook has confirmed that there was no access to financial or credit card information.
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