A publicly scrapped record of data belonging to over 1.5 billion Facebook users was recently put up for sale on a hacker forum.
The stolen data includes names, emails, addresses, locations, gender, phone numbers and Facebook user data.
Although it has nothing to do with Facebook’s recent outage or recent privacy violations, the research firm Privacy Affairs, which has reported on the issue, claimed that the data was allegedly obtained by scrapping publicly available data from Facebook users. Although the scrapped data is publicly available, it can still be used to compromise users’ security and privacy.
While the post has since been removed following the company’s takedown request, there are fears that the data could still be exploited by attackers as they could find their way to other locations or have already been bought by attackers.
Facebook users are advised not to make their profiles public to avoid their data being scrapped.
They are also advised not to take Facebook quizzes or grant Facebook apps permission to access their personal information and only take part in surveys, games and quizzes from verified sources.