The US-based social media behemoth Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) is in the spotlight again for being entangled in password-linked mayhem. Facebook revealed that the company has inadvertently uploaded email contacts of nearly 1.5 million of its naive-new users on the social media site since May 2016.
The retrieved contacts, however, were not obviously shared or abused by neither any marketing agency nor their native staff said the tech giant. Rather the company had assured in deleting them completely and those new users will be notified once their exposed contacts are erased.
It clearly passes a message that if an alert pops up on your Instagram profile or Facebook account then you are supposed to reset your password as a part of security stratagem.
“These contacts were not shared with anyone and we’re deleting them. We’ve fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported. People can also review and manage the contacts they share with Facebook in their settings.”
Usually, the passwords are encrypted with a private key preventing them from being exposed to access. Being caught by the media light, Facebook endorsed the glitch, remarking that it had identified the unencrypted password record as a section of customary security review.
The problem arises when Facebook proposed its fresh users for their email passwords while signing up, a strange appeal which was notified by a cybersecurity expert referred by the term “e-sushi.”
Just a few weeks back Facebook had garnered email contacts of the users without their awareness or approval while signing up. Facebook has been continuously hammered by the plenty of privacy concerns, that includes a snag that shared the millions of users passwords in a simple readable format in its native systems by its staff. Facebook had admitted that as well.
Just last month Facebook was in hot water for mishandling users’ phone numbers. The Facebook users, nonetheless, found it to be more vexatious that their contact number could be used to ‘look into’ their profile and invade their personal data space which is profoundly irresistible and offensive. Despite demanding to use phone number only for two-factor authentication (2FA) method to guard users’ account, anyone on the web can use a phone number as the imparted key in exploring Facebook users’ profile.
But, as of this situation, it is upon a very thin and harmless security glitch that is related to the password which is being used for logging into the system for the first time. The mighty social network has been bruised by a sequence of embarrassments since last year, which has significantly impaired the user trust.
In the previous year, the company was in a tough battle to justify its online presence following the apocalypses that Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based political consulting firm, collected and traded the personal information from millions of Facebook user’s profiles without their assent.
Facebook has also been enduring strong critique and objections from lawmakers across the globe just because of the continuous data breaches of its millions of users and the loopholes in the security system. That indeed paves way for an enormous amount of animosity speech and information portability across the social media network.
Clearly, the growing influence of Facebook on society demands that the social media behemoth must secure its social media gateway and should not be abused for any personal motive or propagate misappropriate information.
