Facebook users, once again, have been victims of a mass data leakage on Saturday after an unnamed user from a hacking firm published data, which was supposed to be secure, for public viewing on the internet. Around 533 million users were victims of this privacy breach. 

The leaked information, which is accessible without any cost, includes private fragments like locations, bios, birthdates, Facebook IDs and even email address information in some cases. Such data leaks have the potential to make the user a target to high degrees of cybercrime like impersonation and fraud, reported Markets Insider. 

A spokesperson from Facebook responded, “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019”, reported AFP.

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Even though the data leak does not seem to target any specific set of demographics, the information comes from countries that rank in the number of users. The leaked data accounts for people residing in 106 countries in the world, with the major chunk coming from the United States, United Kingdom and India. 

More than 32 million Facebook users from the US have been included in the 533 million, while UK and India account for 11 million and 6 million, respectively. 

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In an interaction with Markets Insider, Hudson Rock’s chief technology officer Alon Gal said, “A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts.”

Facebook users have previously been in the crosshairs of those who seek to leak personal data. In 2019, the social media and tech giant landed in a major privacy stir after the personal contact information of millions of users, including phone numbers, was leaked and made publicly available.