6 Million Accounts Exposed On FaceBook Without Permission

 Anger mounts after Facebook's 'shadow profiles' leak in bug

Summary: Facebook said Friday it fixed a bug that exposed contact info for over six million accounts. The admission revealed its 'shadow profile' data collection activities, and users are furious.

By Violet Blue for Zero Day | June 23, 2013 -- 01:54 GMT (18:54 PDT)

Friday Facebook announced the fix of a bug it said inadvertently exposed the private information of over six million users when Facebook's previously unknown shadow profiles accidentally merged with user accounts in data history record requests.

According to Reuters, the data leak spanned a year beginning in 2012.

The personal information leaked by the bug is information that had not been given to Facebook by the users - it is data Facebook has been compiling on its users behind closed doors, without their consent.

A growing number of Facebook users are furious and demand to know who saw private information they had expressly not given to Facebook.


Facebook was accidentally combining user's shadow profiles with their Facebook profiles and spitting the merged information out in one big clump to people they 'had some connection to' who downloaded an archive of their account with Facebook's Download Your Information (DYI) tool.

According to the admissions in its blog, posted late Friday afternoon, Facebook appears to be obtaining users' offsite email address and phone numbers and attempting to match them to other accounts. It appears that the invisible collected information is then being stored in each user's 'shadow profile' that is somehow attached to accounts.

Users were clearly unaware that offsite data about them was being collected, matched to them, and stored by Facebook.

Continue Reading at ...... http://www.zdnet.com/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-shadow-profiles-leak-in-bug-7000017167/