Facebook announced yesterday that it is investigating a report about publishing information on the Internet related to the names and phone numbers of more than 267 million people who use its social networking site.
This database was available for download last week on a hacker forum belonging to a criminal network, according to a blog on the "Comparetech" website.
The blog said that the Internet security researcher Bob Dyashenko discovered this database, which was accessible, and included Facebook usernames, passwords and phone numbers.
The discovery was reported, and the database later disappears by Thursday, so it is no longer available, according to Complarity.
"We are looking into the case, but we believe that this information is likely to have been seized before making changes to the site in the past few years to better protect people's data," a Facebook spokesman told AFP.
The disclosure of this stolen data comes as the giant social network seeks to rebuild trust with its users and ease their concerns about protecting their information.
US organizers said earlier this month that British consulting firm Cambridge Analika, which was involved in a massive scandal involving theft of Facebook data, had tricked network users into collecting and disposing of their personal information.
The FTC said its investigation, which began in March 2018, concluded that the dissolved political consultancy firm had "engaged in deceptive practices to collect personal information for tens of millions of Facebook users to characterize them as voters and target them later."
The committee added that the British company, which worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, made "misleading" allegations when it attracted Facebook users to do a "personality test", vowing that it would not download any personal information.
The case caused a storm on the issue of data protection when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica was able to create psychological profiles for millions of Facebook users.
Facebook paid $ 5 billion in fines early in the year as a settlement with regulators for misusing user data.