The data of more than 500 million Facebook users was found available on a website for hackers.
The information appears to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of data compiled by Facebook and other social networks and the limits of how secure that information is.
Business Insider was the first outlet to report on the availability of that data. According to the post, the dataset spans 106 countries and includes phone numbers, Facebook identities, full names, locations, dates of birth, and email addresses.
For years, Facebook has tried to solve data security problems. In 2018, the social media giant disabled a feature that allowed users to search for others by phone number, after it was revealed that political services firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed information from up to 87 million Facebook users without the consent or knowledge of those people.
In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher reported finding a database with the names, phone numbers and identities of more than 267 million Facebook users – almost all in the United States – on the open internet. It is unknown if the current data dump is related to this database.
“This is old information that was reported before, in 2019,” the Menlo Park, California-based company said in a statement. “We found and fixed this problem in August 2019.”