Personal data of around 533 million Facebook users have been leaked online for free.

The report from January showed that hackers had been sharing massive amounts of personal Facebook data and now the data has escaped into the wild. The personal data leaked previously is now made available more widely. The security researcher Alon Gal discovered that the hacking forum has made the entire personal data public exposing the details for about 533 million users. According to him, the data includes email addresses, phone numbers,  birth dates, and locations.

Most of the users are from the United States (32 million) while the other 11 million and 5 million are from UK and India.

Security researcher Gal had spotted this leakage in January 2019 and Facebook responded to have fixed the issue in August 2019. This Saturday, the user in a low-level hacking forum published the confidential data of hundreds of millions of users for free online.

According to Business Insider, some of the data appeared to be current which was unable to confirm independently by AFP. It stated that some of the leaked phone numbers still belong to the owners of Facebook accounts.

Facebook said that the reports were the old news. But Gal confirms that it is extremely likely that the phone number used for the account was leaked if you are a Facebook user.

The leaked data will certainly be used by bad actors for social engineering, scamming, marketing, or even hacking. This is definitely not the first time the world’s largest social network has embroiled in controversy due to data leakage.

Previously in 2019, Facebook was fined $5 billion by Federal Trade Commission claiming that it misled the user's confidential data. Third parties such as advertisers were easily accessing the user's personal data for their advertising. The settlement with the government without admitting the guilt was the largest privacy violation fine in American history.

Here is what Alon Gal has to say about the data leakage.

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