Facebook has asked Amazon to take down the data bases, in response to millions of user information being exposed. Researchers at a cybersecurity firm, UpGuard, found user information, posted publicly on Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing servers.
The data that was exposed has been used by a Mexican social media firm, Cultura Colectiva. The firm said in an interview with Reuters that the information they have are “all the same information would be available to anyone that looked at those public pages.”
According to the firm, there has been no private data such as emails or passwords leaked. However,UpGuard reports that the firm left more than 540 million records — including comments, likes, reactions, account names and more — stored on the Amazon S3 storage server without a password, hence, anyone could access the data.
In response to the leak, Facebook said it has worked with Amazon to remove the data once UpGuard flagged that it was available.
“Facebook’s policies prohibit storing Facebook information in a public database,” said Facebook spokesperson in an email to the media. The statement added that Facebook are committed to working with the developers on their platform to protect people’s data.
The social network said, across all platforms, that its policies prohibited Facebook data being stored in publicly-accessible databases.
UpGuard found data about Facebook users as part of their regular checks on Amazon S3 servers that have exposed databases throughout different incidents.
The accidental sharing of data about Facebook users is the latest in a long series of incidents that has managed to expose user’s personal data.
