Posted by & filed under FaceBook, System development.

Man looking at Facebook
Facebook “unintentionally” uploaded the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users without asking permission to do so, the social network has admitted. The data harvesting happened via a system used to verify the identity of new members, Facebook asked new users to supply the password for their email account, and took a copy of their contacts. Facebook said it had now changed the way it handled new users to stop contacts being uploaded. Source: BBC News Date: April 19th, 2019 Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47974574 Discussion
  1. How likely is it that no one immediately noticed that the entire contact lists of 1.5 million people suddenly appeared in a database at Facebook? (If each person only had 100 contacts that would be 150 million entries in a database)
  2. What does it say about Facebook’s software testing procedures that this “error” existed?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *