Facebook shuts down searching people by phone number and email. A single Cambridge Analytica case dragged Facebook in a way that the company had never thought before. Facebook has been going through quite tough time due to the whole privacy breach scene. Since then, the social media giant has been trying to make amends by updating the platform.
It disabled sharing data with the third party applications, changed the email policy of ad targeting. Moreover, Mark himself promised to set up safeguards to protect the user data.
Now, in a recent move, Facebook has decided to shut down the searching of other users via phone numbers and emails. The decision is taken not only due to the limelight of the data breach scandal but actually there has been a data scraping activity on Facebook lately.
According to the report, some ‘malicious actors’ got access to the people’s phone numbers and email addresses through the ‘Dark Web’ and then with the help of automated programs, they fed that data to Facebook’s search bar, this information showed them the user profiles connected to these numbers and addresses.
Through this information hackers got the public profiles and as such, can gain right to use all the information that a user is permitting to share on its profile. This incident led to some potential threats including identity theft and many others.
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In a blog post, Facebook writes,
“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. So we have now disabled this feature.”
On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg stated,
“We built this feature, and it’s very useful. There were a lot of people using it up until we shut it down today.”
In a view of fact that the hackers also mistreated Facebook’s account recovery function by acting as if to be valid users who had forgotten their account details. So, in order to overcome the risk of information scraping, Facebook is also changing the way users recover their accounts.
By depending on the condition, how other people can search you on Facebook, it allows the users to change their privacy and recovery settings by switching off the features.
However, a research reveals that tons of people just rely on the default settings which eventually get their information exposed to unwanted people. So, you have to set the privacy condition according to your choice. In order to make securer account, do apply more strict privacy settings.
