On April 3, Business Insider published a story saying that information from more than 530 million Facebook users had been made publicly available in an unsecured database. We have teams dedicated to addressing these kinds of issues and understand the impact they can have on the people who use our services. It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019.

Scraping is a common tactic that often relies on automated software to lift public information from the internet that can end up being distributed in online forums like this. The methods used to obtain this data set were previously reported in 2019. This is another example of the ongoing, adversarial relationship technology companies have with fraudsters who intentionally break platform policies to scrape internet services. As a result of the action we took, we are confident that the specific issue that allowed them to scrape this data in 2019 no longer exists. But since there’s still confusion about this data and what we’ve done, we wanted to provide more details here.

What Happened?

We believe the data in question was scraped from people’s Facebook profiles by malicious actors using our contact importer prior to September 2019. This feature was designed to help people easily find their friends to connect with on our services using their contact lists.

When we became aware of how malicious actors were using this feature in 2019, we made changes to the contact importer. In this case, we updated it to prevent malicious actors from using software to imitate our app and upload a large set of phone numbers to see which ones matched Facebook users. Through the previous functionality, they were able to query a set of user profiles and obtain a limited set of information about those users included in their public profiles. The information did not include financial information, health information or passwords.

Keeping Your Account Safe

Scraping data using features meant to help people violates our terms. We have teams across the company working to detect and stop these behaviours.

We’re focused on protecting people’s data by working to get this data set taken down and will continue to aggressively go after malicious actors who misuse our tools wherever possible. While we can’t always prevent data sets like these from recirculating or new ones from appearing, we have a dedicated team focused on this work.

While we addressed the issue identified in 2019, it’s always good for everyone to make sure that their settings align with what they want to be sharing publicly. In this case, updating the “How People Find and Contact You” control could be helpful. We also recommend people do regular privacy checkups to make sure that their settings are in the right place, including who can see certain information on their profile and enabling two-factor authentication.

We are delighted to present to you, Doing Business in Nigeria Conference (DBNC) happening on the 17th of April 2021 and organised by Linda Uneze, Co-Founder, Maurice Xandra Solutions.

DBNC is a business initiative established to create a platform where business professionals can share their experiences in addition to addressing some of the gaps and challenges peculiar to a developing nation like Nigeria. With the global influence of Nigeria, its population size and people resources, there is the need for interstate and global partnerships. So, the aim of the discourse is to showcase the will of businesses, the opportunities in the Nigerian market in a bid to attract investors, enlighten potential entrepreneurs and foster collaboration.

This maiden event is themed “Reshaping the Business Environment” and the focus will be on how economic threats can be transformed into business success and the role of talents in driving business sustainability. The Keynote speakers are Valentine Ozigbo, Immediate Past President and Group CEO of Transcorp Group and Mofoluwaso Ilevbare, the HR Director of P & G Australia and New Zealand. Our Panel Discussants consists of Dr Teddy Ngu, the Executive Director of GB Foods, Africa, Marilyn Maduka, People Director West Africa Ab Inbev, Lanre Da-Silva Ajayi, Managing Director of Lanre Da-Silva, Eyong Ebai, Zone General Manager GE Healthcare Europe, Middle East & Africa, Amaka Nsofor, Executive Director, Debt Market, Standard Chartered, Ifeoluwa Orioke, Chief Commercial Officer, Flutterwave, Yemi Faseun, HR Head Globacom and Lara Yeku, HR Head, Food Division Flour Mills.

This event will attract audiences such as Business Leaders, Senior Executives, Investors, Potential Entrepreneurs and Nation Builders. This event is sponsored by Flutterwave, a global Fintech company and GB Foods Africa, makers of Gino, Jago, Bama, Jumbo and other household items. Our media partners are BusinessDay, Nairametrics and the Workbooth Magazine.

For free access, please click on the link to register: bit.ly/dbnc

Additional Information as Needed

Dateline – 17th April 2021
Company info –Maurice Xandra Solutions is an HR consulting firm that specializes in providing HR advisory services, team building, recruitment including executive search and soft skill trainings.
Contact information – [email protected] [email protected]
09049313488