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New York (dpa) - Telephone numbers, email addresses and other data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users were discovered again in a hacker forum over the weekend.
“These are old data that were reported back in 2019.
We discovered and fixed the problem in August 2019, ”wrote a spokeswoman for the online network on Saturday (local time) on Twitter.
The IT security company Hudson Rock had previously discovered data from 533 million Facebook users online, as the news site "Business Insider" reported.
When personal information such as email addresses and phone numbers circulate, the risk increases that people will fall for fake emails because they can be made more authentic.
According to the latest information, Facebook has 2.8 billion users who are active at least once a month.
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As early as 2019, the phone numbers of 420 million users appeared on the network after a friend search function had been misused to access data.
The telephone numbers were not openly visible, but could be called up on a large scale using automated inquiries - so-called "scraping".
This violated the Facebook rules, but was technically possible until the online network finally switched off the function.
Once such data has been tapped, it can hardly be stopped from spreading on the internet.
Scraping has always been a problem for Facebook.
In 2018, for example, the online network had to admit that all publicly accessible data from the then more than two billion users was systematically collected through automatic retrieval.
Later there were data protection debates about the company Clearview AI, which collected publicly visible images from, among other things, Facebook's photo platform Instagram and on this basis compiled a database for facial recognition.
Clearview AI customers include US law enforcement agencies.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210404-99-81028 / 2
Tweet from Facebook spokeswoman