TechCrunch
Facebook Security Bug Exposed Personal Account Information, Emails And Phone Numbers, Six Million Accounts Affected
A Facebook security bug exposed users’ personal contact information (email or phone number) to other users who were connected to them; the bug has affected six million accounts.
“When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations,” the security team wrote in a blog post published today.
“Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook,” the post continued. “As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom they have some connection.”
A Facebook spokesperson tells me the bug has been live since last year, and was discovered last week. Facebook says the security team fixed the bug less than 24 hours after it was brought to their attention.
The social giant says six million users had email addresses or phone numbers that were included in the downloads. Additionally, there were non-Facebook users’ email addresses and phone numbers included in the downloads from tools to invite contacts to join Facebook; a Facebook spokesperson tells me that this information wasn’t tied to any Facebook accounts and “wasn’t structured and wasn’t identifiable.”
Facebook says the bug has not been exploited maliciously, and the company is reaching out to the affected users.
“For almost all of the email addresses or telephone numbers impacted, each individual email address or telephone number was only included in a download once or twice,” the post said. “This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person. Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook – not developers or advertisers – have access to the DYI tool.”
Google Makes Google News In Germany Opt-In Only To Avoid Paying Fees Under New Copyright Law
Google News in Germany will soon change. Starting August 1, it will only index sources that have decided to explicitly opt-in to being shown on the search giant’s news-aggregation service. Google News remains an opt-out service in the other 60 countries and languages it currently operates in, but since Germany passed a new copyright law earlier this year that takes effect on August 1, the company is in danger of having to pay newspapers, blogs and other publishers for the right to show even short snippets of news.
Publishers will have to go into Google’s Webmaster Tools to agree to be indexed by Google News. Publishers who don’t do this will simply be removed from the index come August 1.
Many of Germany’s publishers had hoped to force Google to pay a licensing fee for their content, but today’s announcement does not even mention this. Instead, Google notes that it is saddened by the fact that it has to make this change. On its German blog, Google argues that Google News currently gets 6 billion visits per month and that, if anything, it’s providing a free service for publishers that brings them more traffic.
One of the main issues with the “Leistungsschutzrecht” (how’s that for a good German word?) — the ancillary copyright law that the German government passed after large protests earlier this year — is that it’s not clear when a “snippet” becomes a snippet. The law doesn’t feature a clear definition of how long a snippet actually is (140 characters? 160? 250?).
Google always argued that the new law was neither necessary nor useful and that it wouldn’t pay for links and snippets. A number of major German publishers have already said that they will opt-in to being featured in Google News, but there is a good chance that quite a few will decide that they don’t need the traffic.
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Gillmor Gang Live – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording live today at 1pm Pacific.
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