Millions of Facebook Records Found on Amazon Cloud Servers

'Researchers at UpGuard, a cybersecurity firm, found troves of
Facebook user information hiding in plain sight, inadvertently posted
publicly on Amazon.com's cloud computing servers. From a report:
The discovery shows that a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal
exposed how unsecure and widely disseminated Facebook users'
information is online, companies that control that information at
every step still haven't done enough to seal up private data,
Bloomberg News reports. In one instance, Mexico City-based media
company Cultura Colectiva openly stored 540 million records on
Facebook users, including identification numbers, comments, reactions
and account names. That database was closed on Wednesday after
Bloomberg alerted Facebook to the problem and Facebook contacted
Amazon. Facebook shares pared their gains after the Bloomberg News
report.

UpGuard adds:
The data sets vary in when they were last updated, the data points
present, and the number of unique individuals in each. What ties them
together is that they both contain data about Facebook users,
describing their interests, relationships, and interactions, that were
available to third party developers. As Facebook faces scrutiny over
its data stewardship practices, they have made efforts to reduce third
party access. But as these exposures show, the data genie cannot be
put back in the bottle. Data about Facebook users has been spread far
beyond the bounds of what Facebook can control today. Combine that
plenitude of personal data with storage technologies that are often
misconfigured for public access, and the result is a long tail of data
about Facebook users that continues to leak'

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/04/03/182215

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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