Another day, another Facebook scandal. Recently, the social media giant started a practice where it asked new people signing up on Facebook for their email’s password.
Raising more than a few eyebrows, Facebook justified it by saying that it only asked users who had email addresses that did not support OAuth.
For those who don’t know, OAuth is an open standard that allows services like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc to share your personal info without using a password.
Since Facebook received a massive backlash for this practice, the algorithm was removed from the system last month.
However, some laymen, who did not know about the issues of sharing their password online, inserted their passwords in the prompt and as a result, Facebook accessed their email contact list. They did not stop at only accessing it, rather they ‘accidentally’ saved them to their server as well.
According to the Facebook spokesperson, 1.5 million records were stored on the servers and the company is trying to fix this issue by deleting the data and contacting the users whose data was compromised.
He said,
We found that in some cases people’s email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account. 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’re deleting them.
This is one of the many data mining scandals that we have seen from the social network in the past. Facebook has lost its credibility due to the back to back scandals surfacing, with every new scandal being related to the older ones.
Always be on the lookout for sketchy emails and prompts asking you for your personal info.