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533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

businessinsider.com

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Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#44

Looks like this is the "To match users to their friends by phone number, you need an API which can take as input a phone number, and return information about if that number has an associated account" problem. There is no way to let a user find their friends on a service without such an API. Yet if you have such an API, someone can simply brute force all phone numbers worldwide (there are only 10^10), and now they hav…

And now you know how those cell phone farming programs were able to pay people a couple bucks a month to run crap on arrays of dozens of phones.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#45

Would like to know if non Facebook users are included because Facebook has non Facebook user's phone numbers due to the fact that Whatsapp uploads the entire phonebook to Whatsapp. That means Facebook is likely to know your phone number although you don't use Facebook or Whatsapp.

Whatsapp doesn't share phone book data with Facebook.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#46

https://haveibeenpwned.com/ I've been pwned 33 times. At this point, it's just noise. My passwords are all unique (password manager). Honest question - What should I worry about?

It's much more of a threat to those who don't use cryptographic randomly generated passwords. And if you add PII to your accounts.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#48

Looks like this is the "To match users to their friends by phone number, you need an API which can take as input a phone number, and return information about if that number has an associated account" problem. There is no way to let a user find their friends on a service without such an API. Yet if you have such an API, someone can simply brute force all phone numbers worldwide (there are only 10^10), and now they hav…

This is the same fallacy that leads to apps asking for permission to access your whole picture library.

Facebook could have an API by which an app can prompt its user to show a list of all of that user’s friends who have the app installed. The app would only learn the identities of people whom the user explicitly selects, and phone numbers would not be part of that identity.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#49

https://haveibeenpwned.com/ I've been pwned 33 times. At this point, it's just noise. My passwords are all unique (password manager). Honest question - What should I worry about?

well it might be embarrassing if someone found out you used facebook.

I guess I could envision a scenario where you're being investigated, and these leaks provide a roadmap of services to subpoena.

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