'We’ve fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported,' Facebook said in a statement.
Facebook has pledged to delete a huge trove of email data harvested from more than 1 million new users since 2016, saying the data was “unintentionally uploaded” to the company.
Earlier this month, The Daily Beast reported that the website had asked new users to hand over email account passwords when signing up to the platform—a big cybersecurity no-no. Now, Facebook has confirmed that about 1.5 million people were affected in this latest privacy scandal. “This is then an example of a Facebook development team determining that an implementation to provide new users with a rich list of friends outweighs the privacy implications,” said Tim Mackey, a senior technical expert at Synopsys, a U.S. cybersecurity company.
Business Insider reported that Facebook's claim of 1.5 million affected users was likely on the low side, because most people will have dozens, or even hundreds, of contacts linked to an email account. In total, there could be dozens or hundreds of millions of people affected, the outlet noted.
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