Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

121–130 of 524 posts

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

#121
post #33

Great, and while you can get sued into oblivion for downloading a Metallica album, all our personal data is downloadable from a public website for 3€. Like for real, it took me 2mins to find the leak myself...

Can you link it? I'd like to check if I am affected.

Regrettably, I was forced to create a FB account for work.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I toyed with that for a while but I kept missing important work calls. I might have a look for an app later, but I have a feeling it might not exist...

I wonder if you can get a VoIP number from a different country (where good regulation means spam is less prevalent) and use that for work calls?

I'm almost 100% sure your employer wouldn't want to make an international call every time they wanted to contact you by phone.

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

#123
post #33

Great, and while you can get sued into oblivion for downloading a Metallica album, all our personal data is downloadable from a public website for 3€. Like for real, it took me 2mins to find the leak myself...

At this point i don't see why only facebook and the thieves should have access to this data. If the data is public it loses its value

Value to whom?

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

#126
post #118
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works for photos because the threat model is about protecting local files against malicious apps. But for phone numbers, you about protecting Facebook API (which is publicly available via the internet) against arbitrary devices, which Facebook has no way to tell from legitimate ones

What I mean is: Facebook should remove that API entirely. Apps do not need a way to look up a phone number in Facebook’s database. The “find my friends using this app” feature does not require this capability.

What you are proposing is that third-party apps should ask Facebook's app to find the friends, right?

But Facebook's app needs to access Facebook's database somehow; and anyone can impersonate Facebook's app and query that database too.

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

#127

I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we still ok with this shit? The sooner we get rid of the cancer that FB is, the better. I didn’t share my contact book with FB apps either. It was probably her—a person in her 70s, not necessarily experienced with tech. The main reason this company exists, or that…

Suggest you send Facebook a CCPA or GDPR data deletion request (even if you don't live in California or the EU) for your real identity.

Cases like yours is why we created https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/facebook.com, which makes its dead simple to send such requests. Free & open source.

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

#129
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could store a salted hash instead for almost everything except using the number as actual phone number (call/SMS)

You need to do a bit more than that; a one-way transform with no secrets isn't good enough for easily brute-forceable data like phone numbers, SSNs, passport numbers, credit card numbers etc. There's just not enough entropy in the data. There are ways to do these things though so the spirit of your comment is correct.

This seems like it would not be obvious to many people here, and so is a very salient comment.

Do you have a link to anything that explains why, and what the ways are to do these things?

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

#130

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.

I have WhatsApp and you can deny access to your phonebook. Everything works just fine
Post reply on HN