Facebook made one of the hardest decision ever, the social network has shut down the searching of people by phone numbers and emails. The ethical side prevails over the technical level of FB’s development.
Facebook reported that some ‘malicious actors’ from the ‘Dark Web’ got access to the sensitive data like users’ emails and phone numbers. That means another gap in the automated programs’ security, which used to feed that data to Facebook’s search bar. Since today, the search bar doesn’t show the user profiles linked to these numbers and e-addresses.
For Mark Zuckerberg, last two weeks were the longest, on Wednesday, Facebook CEO wrote:
“We built this feature, and it’s very useful. There were a lot of people using it up until we shut it down today.”
Facebook blog post added,
“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. So we have now disabled this feature.”
To further reduce the risk of personal data scraping, the social network is also changing the way users recover their accounts, but the level of confidence in FB is getting lower day by day. In many cases, the users just don’t want to take a responsibility for its own cybersecurity. Millions of people just rely on the default settings and ultimately get their information exposed to unwanted people despite the Facebook allows them to make the profile settings more flexible. For an instance, to alter their privacy and recovery settings by switching off the features in question for other people wanting to search them.
