12/31/2023 0 Comments Facebook 2021 data breach![]() The hacked data, first discovered by the website Business Insider, includes the full names, locations, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses of 533 million users from 106 countries. The body has powers to levy fines running into the billions on large tech companies if they are found to have breached UK citizens' rights. The UK watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), has confirmed to The Telegraph it is now looking into the incident with a view to whether it should open an official investigation. On Tuesday, Facebook confirmed the data had been ‘scraped’ from its site by hackers, but that the breach appears to have come from a software flaw the company found and fixed in 2019. The details of more than 530 million users of the social network have been found leaked on a website in recent days. They’re dangerous, irresponsible, at best half-truths designed to enable it to get away with it, as it does again and again.Facebook has refused to apologise after a data breach left the details of 11 million British users exposed, as the UK's data watchdog said it is now looking at the tech giant. And the “facts” Facebook published this week about the data breach aren’t. The US Congress has finally woken up to the danger of disinformation, but the disinformation from Facebook about Facebook is toxic and continues unabated – from its shiny new Oversight Board, a $130m exercise in evading responsibility, to the estimated $7m a year it invests in its own pet Lord Haw Haw, aka Sir Nick Clegg. ![]() ![]() But will it? Enforcements are hard, regulators respond to pressure, and in a news cycle that every day brings fresh new reports of Facebook enabling Nazis or driving teenagers to suicide, this story barely broke through. The Irish Data Protection Commission could act. But so what? It’ll take years and anyway, it’s only money. There will be mass class actions that arise from this breach. Even where there are laws, it operates above them. It’s this culture of impunity that makes Facebook such a dangerous company. What do you do when a trillion-dollar company with 2.8 billion users treats the public with brazen contempt? When it won’t answer basic journalistic inquiries? When it ignores even the regulator? Ireland’s Data Protection Commission – its lead regulator in Europe – released a pointed statement saying that it received “no proactive communication” from Facebook. It later confirmed that it had no intention of informing users because it wasn’t “confident” who they were, users “could not fix the issue”, and anyway, “the data was publicly available”. Instead it published a blogpost, The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data, saying it wasn’t hacked, the data was “scraped”. At an impromptu event on the data breach, journalists from Wired, Politico and Business Insider revealed that it refused to answer their questions too. It passes “exclusive” scoops to favourite reporters, and stonewalls the rest. It uses silence to throttle reporting, a strategy that works. On Tuesday morning I submitted a set of questions to its press office: when was the issue first discovered? Did Facebook inform the regulators (as it is required to under US, UK and EU law)? If so, when? Had it informed users? But Facebook didn’t respond. These are the actions of a company that knows it can get away with it. The news of the latest breach, of 533 million people’s data, dropped over a holiday weekend Facebook responded only by saying it was “old data” and the problem had been “found and fixed in August 2019” – an absurd statement given that the data had only just been dumped on the internet, and clearly that hadn’t been fixed at all. That impunity was in full sight this week. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs.
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