Facebook: New leak of data concerning the phones of millions of users.

Phone numbers associated with more than 400 million Facebook accounts were found electronically stored in the most recent breach of data by that American group, the website reported today. TechCrunch.

Σ419 million files of the world's first social networking site were found on a compromised server, of which 133 million in the US, more than 50 million in Vietnam and 18 million in the UK, according to the US website.

In particular, the identities of Facebook users were registered - a combination of numbers unique to each account - as well as the phone numbers associated with each profile, in some accounts the gender, as well as the geographical location.

The server was not password protected, which meant that anyone could access the databases. The server remained offline until late Wednesday, when TechCrunch contacted the server owners.

Facebook partially confirmed the information to TechCrunch, but downplayed the significance of the incident, stating that at this stage of the checks, the number of accounts involved represents less than half of the aforementioned nearly 419 million.

The group added that several of them were copies and that the data was old. "This set of data has been withdrawn and we have not seen any indication that the security of Facebook accounts has been compromised," a spokesman for Agence France-Presse said.

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018, which exposed the political exploitation of data of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge, the group abolished a function that allowed users to search by phone numbers.

Posting their phone numbers online exposes users to unwanted phone calls as well as piracy, as happened recently to Twitter chairman and CEO Jack Dorsey.

In late August, Facebook unveiled tests for a new feature that allows users to control their data acquired by the US company outside of Facebook. The announcement comes less than a week after new revelations about Facebook practices that it admitted to intercepting audio clips of certain users' conversations, which it had previously denied.

In late July, Facebook was fined a record $ 5 billion by the US Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (FTC) for failing to protect its users' personal data.

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