Facebook Collected Contacts from 1.5 Million Email Accounts Without Users’ Permission

Not a week goes without a new Facebook blunder.

Remember the most recent revelation of Facebook being caught asking
users ^[1] new to the social
network platform for their email account passwords to verify their
identity?

At the time, it was suspected that Facebook might be using
access to users’ email accounts to unauthorizedly and secretly
gather a copy of their saved contacts.

Now it turns out that the collection of email contacts was true,
Facebook finally admits.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Facebook said the social
media company “unintentionally” uploaded email contacts from up to
1.5 million new users on its servers, without their consent or
knowledge, since May 2016.

In other words, nearly 1.5 million users had shared passwords
for their email accounts with Facebook as part of its dubious
verification process.

A Facebook spokesperson shared ^[2] information with
Business Insider that the company was using harvested data to
“build Facebook’s web of social connections and recommend friends
to add.”

The social media giant said the company had stopped this email
verification process a month ago and has assured its users that it
has not shared those contacts with anyone and that it has already
started deleting them.

“Last month we stopped offering email password verification as an
option for people verifying their account when signing up for
Facebook for the first time,” Facebook says.

“We estimate that up to 1.5 million people’s email contacts may
have been uploaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone and
we’re deleting them. We’ve fixed the underlying issue and are
notifying people whose contacts were imported. People can also
review and manage the contacts they share with Facebook in their
settings.”

This recently reported incident is the latest in a long list of
privacy-related issues and controversies the tech giant is dealing
with.
Just last month, Facebook was caught storing passwords of
hundreds of millions of users in plaintext within its internal
servers, which were accessible to some of its employees.

In October last year, Facebook also announced its worst-ever security
breach ^[4] that allowed
hackers to successfully steal secret access tokens and access
personal information from 29 million Facebook
accounts ^[5].

The recent revelation once again underlines the failure of
Facebook to protect its users’ information while generating
billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.

^[3]

References

^{^}
caught asking users
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
shared
(www.businessinsider.in)
^{^}
passwords of hundreds of millions of
users (thehackernews.com)
^{^}
worst-ever security breach
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
29 million Facebook accounts
(thehackernews.com)

References

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