Facebook ‘Unintentionally Uploaded’ 1.5 Mn Email IDs of New Users

The social media giant, according to reports, harvested these emails during sign up.

Facebook’s stock market value has declined by 18 percent since 17 March.

(Photo: iStock)

Facebook Inc, on Thursday, 18 April, said that it “unintentionally uploaded” the email contact of 1.5 million new users since May 2016, a Reuters report, citing Business Insider said.

The latest Facebook mishap has come to light after a security researcher noticed that "Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities".

The company told Business Insider it is now deleting these emails and that it never meant to upload these contacts. The company hasn’t revealed if users from India are part of the affected list but considering its large userbase in the country, don’t be surprised if there are.

This revelation is follow up to the incident which was reported last month, when Facebook was found asking email passwords from its users while logging in.

The social networking giant has confirmed that it will be notifying the affected 1.5 million users over the coming days about the breach and will be deleting their details from the company’s system.

After the report by Kerb on Security, went public few weeks back, Facebook admitted to have stored hundreds of millions of user passwords in plain text within its internal data storage systems.

"Last month we stopped offering email password verification as an option for people verifying their account when signing up for Facebook for the first time," the Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying.

This isn’t the first or let’s say going to be the last incident to come from Facebook this year. Recently it came under scrutiny for using phone numbers provided for security reasons -- like two-factor authentication (2FA) -- for things like advertising and making users searchable by their phone numbers across its different platforms.

Considering all these issues at helm, not sure why is Facebook even planning on working and then launching its own voice assistant that will be competing with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.

(With inputs from Reuters and IANS.)