April 19, 2021
Recently, some 530 million people have had some personal information leaked, including in some cases phone numbers. A digital privacy group is now preparing to take legal action on behalf of affected EU citizens in an Irish court.
Digital Rights Ireland DRI, a group, has also warned other tech giants that their move could be the start of a domino effect. DRI claims that Facebook has failed to protect user data and failed to notify those affected. Although the data leak in question was not discovered and fixed until 2019, it was recently posted online.
Facebook has denied any wrongdoing, claiming the data was “scraped” from publicly available information on the site.
Antoin O Lachtnain, Director of Digital Rights Ireland (DRI), warned other tech giants against this move: “This will be the first mass action of its kind, but we’re sure it won’t be the last. The scale of this breach, and the depth of personal information compromised, is gob-smacking. The laws are there to protect consumers and their personal data and it’s time these technology giants wake up to the reality that protection of personal data must be taken seriously.”
In response to DRI’s lawsuit, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We understand people’s concerns, which is why we continue to strengthen our systems to make scraping from Facebook without our permission more difficult and go after the people behind it. As LinkedIn and Clubhouse have shown, no company can completely eliminate scraping or prevent data sets like these from appearing. That’s why we devote substantial resources to combat it and will continue to build out our capabilities to help stay ahead of this challenge.”
For more information, see the original story in BBC
