Facebook Responds To 533 Million Users Data Hack And Calls It Scraping

It was recently announced that Facebook was hit by a massive hack in which the data of around 533 million users had been tapped. Now the social network has published new information – but they don’t want to speak of a “hack”.

Last weekend it emerged that Facebook was or is affected by a data leak, where the word massive is almost an understatement. The stolen data records from more than 530 million users contain names, Facebook IDs, locations, biographical information, telephone numbers and, in some cases, e-mail addresses. The data set is a real treasure trove for criminals and spammers, while the damage to Facebook’s image is enormous at the same time.

And the network now wants to keep this as low as possible. One wants to achieve this on the one hand through clarification and transparency, on the other hand, one wants to take the edge off something with one’s own interpretation of the events. And so Facebook has now published the “facts” about this incident – by the way, there is no apology in the post on the Facebook newsroom.

Facebook Calls It Scraping Not Hacking

Above all, Facebook wants to remove the word hack from history and writes: “It is important to understand that malicious actors did not obtain this data by hacking our systems, but rather by scraping it from our platform before September 2019.“

The profile data was collected using automated software. The method is not new, according to Facebook, but steps have been taken to prevent it in the future: “We are confident that the specific problem that made it possible to scrape this data in 2019 no longer exists.”

The “problem” mentioned was related to the import of contacts. The Facebook app was “impersonated”, according to the social network, in order to “upload a large set of phone numbers to see which of them correspond to Facebook users”. Facebook continues: “With the previous functionality, they could query a number of user-profiles and get a limited amount of information about these users that was contained in their public profiles. The information did not include financial information, health information or passwords.”