Facebook admits uploading email contacts of 1.5m new users in latest privacy blunder
Facebook has admitted it “unintentionally” uploaded the email address contacts of 1.5m new users since 2016 in the latest privacy misstep for the social media giant.
The data scraping happened during the verification process for new accounts, when users were asked to supply their email address password and Facebook kept a copy of their address book.
Read more: The tech giants are welcoming regulation – that may be a signal to panic
The tech firm said all users who had been affected by the breach would be notified and all contacts would be deleted, however the information is likely to have been used to identify the social connections between users to power the “recommended friends” feature.
“We estimate that up to 1.5 million people’s email contacts may have been uploaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone and we are deleting them,” Facebook told Business Insider.
Before May 2016, the company offered new users the option to verify their account and voluntarily upload their contacts at the same time.
However, the process was changed and users were not warned that the contacts would be uploaded.
Read more: Millions of Facebook user records leaked on public Amazon web servers
It is the latest in a string of privacy-related issue for the firm. Earlier this month the data of millions of Facebook users was left publicly available on Amazon cloud-computing servers.
The Silicon Valley giant was also implicated in the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica, which is thought to have scraped data from 87m Facebook users.