Data from more than 500 million Facebook accounts found online

Details of more than 500 million Facebook users are available on a hacker website.

The information appears to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social networking sites, and the limits on the security of that information.

Business Insider first reported the availability of the dataset. According to that post, it has information for 106 countries, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, dates of birth, and email addresses.

Facebook has been grappling with data security issues for years. In 2018, the social media giant disabled a feature that allowed users to search each other through a phone number following revelations that political firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed information from up to 87 million Facebook users. without your knowledge or consent.

In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher reported finding a database with the names, phone numbers, and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users, nearly all based in the US, in Open internet. It is not clear if the current data dump is related to this database.

“This is old data that was previously reported in 2019,” the Menlo Park, California-based company said in a statement. “We found and fixed this problem in August 2019.”