Facebook Suffers A Data Breach About How It’s Hoping To Stop The Media Talking About Its Last Data Breach.

 

Facebook has suffered another data breach.

Hot on the heels of the revelation that the phone numbers and personal data of half a billion Facebook users had been leaked online, the social network has goofed again.

But this time it’s Facebook’s PR team rather than its users who have been left exposed.

Someone in Facebook’s EMEA Communications team seems to have accidentally forwarded an internal email to a journalist covering the story of the Facebook data breach.

Our guess is that a Facebook employee attempted to forward the internal communication to a colleague, and their email client accidentally auto-completed the recipient’s name to be that of an external journalist. Oops!

What makes matters worse for Facebook, is that the email reveals the company’s strategy for handling questions about the exposure of 533 million users’ data, painting the problem as an issue for the whole technology industry.

Belgian journalist Pieterjan Van Leemputten was the recipient of the accidental email from Facebook on 8 April.

In other words – hunker down, the media will stop writing about it, and the storm will pass.

Facebook’s communications team says it’s not planning to comment further on the breach as long as the media coverage continues to decline.

However, the social network says it is going to be revealing more data-scraping incidents in an attempt to normalize the issue as one that plagues the entire industry

To be clear, Facebook said that the problem was initially discovered and resolved in August 2019. But at least one researcher says that he first warned Facebook that the potential problem back in 2017.

Facebook has tried to downplay the incident, and pitched it as an industry-wide issue. But their arguments are unconvincing, and their failure to acknowledge that they failed to properly fix the problem in the past is telling us loud and clear about their transparency and openness.

Facebook knew there was a problem, and failed to do anything until half a billion users’ details were released. And even now it still hasn’t contacted affected users.

There’s only one way we’re likely to get answers (and, heaven forbid, an actual apology) from Facebook is if we keep talking about it.