Facebook exposes personal information of up to 80 million members

Posted by Joe on July 28th, 2008

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We have warned previously of the potential identity theft risks that exist for Facebook users. One issue that we didn’t specifically address was the risk that the popular social network would inadvertently expose personal information of its users through a technical glitch. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened earlier this month when many of Facebook’s 80 million users had their full birth dates exposed on their profile pages.

Graham Cluley, a security expert with Sophos, was one of the first to uncover the breach of date of birth information and alerted Facebook immediately. The problem was fixed shortly thereafter.

The main issue in this case is that many of the impacted Facebook users had proactively set their date of birth to be non-visible to other Facebook users. This is a precaution we recommend in our Facebook identity theft protection guide.

Cluley recommended that, in addition to keeping date of birth hidden in the future, Facebook users take additional steps to protect this sensitive information in the future.

“My advice to Facebook users would be, even if your date of birth
is set to be non-visible, change it to a made-up date in case this kind
of blunder happens again. Facebook and other social networking websites
need to be more careful about protecting their members’ data, or risk
losing users.”

Learn more on how to protect yourself on Facebook by visiting our Facebook identity theft protection guide.

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