There has been a seemingly endless amount of data breaches at Facebook. It does not look like that is going to end any time soon. The world’s largest social media platform has screwed up yet again and left the data for more than 500 million of their users exposed in the process. A cybersecurity company has recently found an enormous amount of user data that was just sitting on cloud servers for Amazon. The data was not protected in any way. It was completely exposed and available to any person who might have stumbled upon it. The total amount of users that are impacted is 530 million. This is yet another black eye for the reputation of Facebook in what has been a nightmare six months for the company.
There have been a string of privacy scandals involving Facebook. However, this latest disaster is the biggest one to date. There is no telling right now how much damage will be wrought as a result of all this user data being exposed. The problem is much bigger than 530,000 users having their data exposed. There is also the fact that the data has been online for several months. This means that many people could have found the user data, copied it and posted it elsewhere. Taking the data down now really would not solve the problem. Once the data is out there for the world to see, there is no way to know for sure how many times it has been seen and who has it.
This incident only heightens the need for the United States to have better privacy laws like the ones they have in Europe. There are no laws that require companies like Facebook to tell users that their data has been exposed. Therefore, there is no way for you to know for sure if you have been impacted by the data breach and your data could possibly be in the hands of criminals. Facebook users are advised to change their passwords just to be sure.
There are many countries that are taking the issue of online privacy much more seriously than American lawmakers. Over the past several years, various European countries have made laws that require online companies to give users access to their data whenever they request it. Companies must also let users know any time their data could have possibly been exposed in a data breach.
Dil Bole Oberoi
