Facebook leak exposes personal info on 533m users

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Originally published at: Facebook leak exposes personal info on 533m users | Boing Boing

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Started my day with two panicked clients and one family member telling me that they or their spouse can’t get into their FB accounts. The script kiddies are already busy using the breach data to change passwords and probably download entire posting histories for further mischief and database building.

Between the breach info and publicly available FB posts, the fraudsters and identity thieves are going to have a field day.

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Oops.

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Whoever would have thought that making a giant repository of billions of people’s personal data kept in the care of an ethically murky (at best) megacorporation run by a morally corrupt skeezball would have been a liability?

(/s provided but hopefully not necessary)

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Waynes World Yes GIF

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Gizmodo’s story offers a link where one can check one’s pwned status.

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I’m not sure what “The News Each Day” is, so I’d hesitate to enter phone numbers there. I’d wait until a better-known brand offers the same service.

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I’m not on f_c_book, and somehow I still feel violated.

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This will be interesting. I try to talk to scammers a bit when they call, just to try and learn about what it is they are trying to accomplish. Sometimes they know my name.

But I am not me on Facebook, I am some person I made up. So if they start looking for that guy, I’ll know I was in the leak.

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Neither my spouse or myself have ever had facebook accounts and my family doesn’t understand why. I’ve told them it’s a data mining operation that is weaponized against them, plus there’s the ‘chance’ (certainty) that there will be breaches that exposes their information to even less savory players.
I somehow doubt even this most recent news will dissuade any of them from using the infernal service. Sigh.

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You and me both - but remember, Facebook will have been building shadow profiles of us as we visit sites infested with Facebook trackers.

And yet, there’s little we can do to stop them acquiring and holding information about us because we’re not registered Facebook users.

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You might actually be effected as the leak wasn’t of FB accounts, but of the shadow profiles they run for people who don’t use FB, but get hit by their tracking beacons around the web. These ‘accounts’ are really ‘profiles’ that FB has amassed on people who have interacted with FB properties, but have not created FB accounts.

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Throw these into your hosts file (as administrator if Windows) or block at the router:

(No doubt they’re always adding new ones.)

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I wonder how many of the 533m users will give up on FB. I suspect this event will barely move the needle.

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It won’t effect anything as none of these profiles were for FB users.

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Everything I’m reading in the tech press says this dump contains data from accounts with FB user IDs rather than from shadow accounts. I’m not ruling out your contention, because FB is a sleazy company that treats its active user rolls the same way the Mormons treat their baptism records. I would be interested in seeing your source, though, so I can get a better picture of what’s going on here.

Meanwhile, Wall Street doesn’t give a damn about this company’s garbage security practises.

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This is why I don’t enable content from any of FB’s domains, and you’re right about how widespread the infestation has become. Sites I’ve used for a decade are suddenly updated and take a lot of work to view and use without that crap. The part that disturbs me is more obvious than the trackers, though. They push people to use an ID from Facebook or Google, instead of the unique one supported by the site. That’s a game I refuse to play.

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I’m not on facebook and i feel vindicated… :slight_smile:

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Much to the chagrin to my fiends and family I disabled my account a month or two before Cambridge Analytica scandal. When the scandal broke I said “See! see! This is why.” and it had zero impact. Not one person that I know of in my circle dropped Facebook.

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I wouldn’t rule out shadow profiles being part of the leak either but i’d like to see some citation as well because all the articles i’ve read so far haven’t mentioned it.

I’m wondering if this is the moment when Zuckerberg’s garage of oily rags finally catches fire and takes the whole house with it.

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