Facebook Bug Exposes Contact Info for 6M Users
Facebook on Friday revealed that a bug inadvertently exposed the contact information of 6 million of its users via the social network’s download your information (DYI) tool.
The glitch has since been fixed, and affected members are being notified, Facebook said in a post on its security blog.
The problem stemmed from a tool that allows users to upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook so that the social network can serve up friend recommendations or invite people to join Facebook.
“Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook,” the company wrote in the blog post.
As a result, when members used Facebook’s DYI tool, which provides them with a copy of all their Facebook data, some were also provided with email addresses or phone numbers they did not previously have. “This contact information was provided by other people on Facebook and was not necessarily accurate, but was inadvertently included with the contacts of the person using the DYI tool,” Facebook said.