Apr 18, 2019

Facebook scraped email contacts of 1.5 million users

Facebook "Unintentionally" uploaded the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users without asking permission to do so, the social network has admitted. Facebook asked new users to supply the password for their email account, and took a copy of their contacts. This option and the text specifying that contacts were being grabbed was changed in May 2016 but the underlying code that actually scraped contacts was left intact, said Facebook. The email contacts case is the latest in a long series in which Facebook has mishandled the data of some of its billions of users. In late March, Facebook found that the passwords of about 600 million users were stored internally in plain text for months.

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