Following the discovery of millions of exposed records at the Amazon.com Inc’s cloud servers by cybersecurity firm UpGuard, Facebook has said that it has removed public databases containing its user data form Amazon’s cloud servers.
On Wednesday, the Cyber Risk team of UpGuard claimed in a blog post that Amazon servers were openly used for storing personal data of about 540 million of Facebook users by the Mexico City-based news website Cultura Colectiva. The personal data of the Facebook users included records of their identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names.
UpGuard said that names, passwords and email addresses of 22,000 people were listed by another database from an app called At the Pool.
All of the Facebook records were the result of interaction with Facebook users which it did on its three of its pages on Facebook, Cultura Colectiva said in a statement. The company also said that such information can be accessed publicly by anyone who decides to visit and browse the pages.
“Neither sensitive nor private data, like emails or passwords, were amongst those because we do not have access to that kind of data, so we did not put our users’ privacy and security at risk,” Cultura Colectiva said. “We are aware of the potential uses of data in current times, so we have reinforced our security measures to protect the data and privacy of our Facebook fanpages’ users.”
There were no comments from Alex Capecelatro, who was chief executive of At the Pool before it shut down around 2014, when contacted by the media Once alerted to the issue, it worked with Amazon to take down the databases, Facebook said in a statement.
“Facebook’s policies prohibit storing Facebook information in a public database,” the company said.
In the last one year or more, a number of privacy-related issues has tormented Facebook bringing in greater regulatory scrutiny and the controversies included a technical glitch that made the passwords of millions of its users, which were stored in a readable format within its internal systems, open and accessible for its employees.
The scandal surrounding the Cambridge Analytica in which this analytics company managed to get hold of personal data and profiles of millions of users of the social media company without their consent last year, was amongst the largest data breaches ever in terms of number of users involved. It was also alleged that the data was used by Cambridge Analytica to influence voters during the 2016 United States Presidential elections.
Later, some policy and technical changes for better protection of user data was announced by Facebook which included reviewing the processes of at least thousands of apps which had been granted permission by Facebook to access data of the users..
(Source:www.economictime.indiatimes.com)
On Wednesday, the Cyber Risk team of UpGuard claimed in a blog post that Amazon servers were openly used for storing personal data of about 540 million of Facebook users by the Mexico City-based news website Cultura Colectiva. The personal data of the Facebook users included records of their identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names.
UpGuard said that names, passwords and email addresses of 22,000 people were listed by another database from an app called At the Pool.
All of the Facebook records were the result of interaction with Facebook users which it did on its three of its pages on Facebook, Cultura Colectiva said in a statement. The company also said that such information can be accessed publicly by anyone who decides to visit and browse the pages.
“Neither sensitive nor private data, like emails or passwords, were amongst those because we do not have access to that kind of data, so we did not put our users’ privacy and security at risk,” Cultura Colectiva said. “We are aware of the potential uses of data in current times, so we have reinforced our security measures to protect the data and privacy of our Facebook fanpages’ users.”
There were no comments from Alex Capecelatro, who was chief executive of At the Pool before it shut down around 2014, when contacted by the media Once alerted to the issue, it worked with Amazon to take down the databases, Facebook said in a statement.
“Facebook’s policies prohibit storing Facebook information in a public database,” the company said.
In the last one year or more, a number of privacy-related issues has tormented Facebook bringing in greater regulatory scrutiny and the controversies included a technical glitch that made the passwords of millions of its users, which were stored in a readable format within its internal systems, open and accessible for its employees.
The scandal surrounding the Cambridge Analytica in which this analytics company managed to get hold of personal data and profiles of millions of users of the social media company without their consent last year, was amongst the largest data breaches ever in terms of number of users involved. It was also alleged that the data was used by Cambridge Analytica to influence voters during the 2016 United States Presidential elections.
Later, some policy and technical changes for better protection of user data was announced by Facebook which included reviewing the processes of at least thousands of apps which had been granted permission by Facebook to access data of the users..
(Source:www.economictime.indiatimes.com)
