500 million personal data of Facebook users have been found on the hacker website

NEW YORK (AP) – Details of more than 500 million Facebook users have been found on a hacker website.

The information appears to be several years old, but this is another example of the vast amount of information gathered by Facebook and other social media sites, and the limitations on how secure that information is.

The availability of the data set was first announced by Business Insider. According to this publication, it has information from 106 countries, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, dates of birth and email addresses.

Facebook has been battling data security issues for years. In 201

8, the social media giant deactivated a feature that allows users to search for each other by phone number after revelations that the political company Cambridge Analytica has gained access to information for up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent.

In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher announced that he had discovered a database of names, phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users – almost all based in the United States – on the open Internet. It is not clear whether the current data disposal is related to this database.

“These are old data that were previously reported in 2019,” said a statement from the California-based company Menlo. “We discovered and fixed this problem in August 2019.”