Almost every Facebook user's data has been scraped, Zuckerberg says

Our Facebook privacy nightmare somehow keeps getting worse.

The vast majority of Facebook users have likely had their public profile data scraped by third-parties, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Wednesday.

The seemingly massive privacy loophole was the result of a feature that allowed people to search for friends using their phone number. The setting, which has now been removed, was enabled by default in order to make it easier for users' to find friends.

But on Wednesday, Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer revealed that bad actors have been abusing the feature for years in order to gain access to public profile data. "Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way," he wrote. Read more...