Facebook Downplayed Data Breach In Internal Email

According to an internal email at the Facebook office, which was incidentally sent to the Data News based in Belgium, has made public regarding the social media platform’s strategy for its dealing concerning the breach of sensitive data concerning the details of Facebook accounts of more than 533 million users worldwide.

Data breach of Facebook

It has been suggested that Facebook is currently expecting more accidents of such nature to occur in the future and is working on planning to frame it as a problem with the entire industry, making it seem like a normal occurrence. It also stated that the media attention surrounding this issue would soon die down.

As a consequence, Facebook planned to only issue a limited statement regarding the reoccurring problem with their social media platform.

It has been confirmed by Facebook that the memo which had recently been made public regarding their data breach is, in fact, genuine and has not been forged, and also said that they are currently trying to commit towards continuing their resources to further educate their clientele about scarping of data.

They understand the concerns people are having regarding the major social media site, which is the reason behind Facebook’s continuation to strengthen their working systems which would make scraping of data from Facebook a difficult process when performed without the permission of the firm, making it possible for Facebook to take legal actions against them.

This is the reason why Facebook is devoting a substantial amount of its resources to combat this growing issue to limit and prevent it from happening in the future. The tech firm would try to continue in an attempt to extend their capabilities to help them stay ahead of this challenging task.

The private data taken from around 533 million Facebook users located in 106 countries throughout the world was published in the earlier week of this month on a hacking forum. According to Facebook, the sensitive information leaked during the security breach was very old, and most of it was from the previously leaking of information in the year 2019.

They had denied all wrongdoing and has stated that the data involved in the data breach from Facebook was scraped from information already made available for public consumption on the webpage.

Currently, Facebook is facing a probe from the data commissioner of Ireland regarding whether the tech frim broke any of the GDPR regulations, along with a class-action lawsuit from the affected citizens of the European Union, who had suffered from a range of leaked personal information, including private cell phone numbers.

The email which has been published by the Data News is dated April 8, which is several days after the news regarding the security breach was broken in the news. It has been said that the press coverage on Facebook’s breach issue has already declined more than 30% in the ‘top tier global publications.

User’s reputation

The Data News has provided a summarized version regarding the reporting of the story to date. It noted that the publications have offered a more critical take on the response by Facebook, and naming it as an evasive technique, along with deflecting the blame and being absent from the apology from the users who have been directly impacted by the breach.

They also added that the pieces were driven by quotes from regulators or data regulators and are keen on disapproving the response by the company as insufficient.

In the section named long-term strategy, the firm stated that they had not prepared any further statement on this concerning issue. Facebook said that they are currently expecting more incidents of data scraping and think that it is important to frame this as an industry problem on a broad scale, along with normalizing the fact that this activity could possibly occur on a regular basis.

Facebook also added in their statement that they are planning to include a blog post on which they would post regarding their anti-scraping work, which would provide a clear description about the dealing of the firm with the problems.

Questioning has been done by Data News on the assertion by Facebook that the security breach was discovered and resolved in August 2019, and it has been pointed out by an ethical hacker and forewarned the firm two years prior that it was possible to find any person’s personal phone number through Facebook.

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