Millions of Facebook Records Found on Amazon Cloud Servers

Researchers at UpGuard, a cybersecurity firm, found troves of Facebook user information hiding in plain sight, inadvertently posted publicly on Amazon.com's cloud computing servers. From a report: The discovery shows that a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how unsecure and widely disseminated Facebook users' information is online, companies that control that information at every step still haven't done enough to seal up private data, Bloomberg News reports. In one instance, Mexico City-based media company Cultura Colectiva openly stored 540 million records on Facebook users, including identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names. That database was closed on Wednesday after Bloomberg alerted Facebook to the problem and Facebook contacted Amazon. Facebook shares pared their gains after the Bloomberg News report. UpGuard adds: The data sets vary in when they were last updated, the data points present, and the number of unique individuals in each. What ties them together is that they both contain data about Facebook users, describing their interests, relationships, and interactions, that were available to third party developers. As Facebook faces scrutiny over its data stewardship practices, they have made efforts to reduce third party access. But as these exposures show, the data genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Data about Facebook users has been spread far beyond the bounds of what Facebook can control today. Combine that plenitude of personal data with storage technologies that are often misconfigured for public access, and the result is a long tail of data about Facebook users that continues to leak.

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