Tucked away in one of its announcements, however, was a really annoying revelation. That malicious individuals may have been scraping the data of Facebook users without their knowledge. And nobody is safe.
Buried in the post was a startling revelation, that anybody with access to your phone number or email address may have used that knowledge to scrape public profile information.
It all starts benign enough, explaining why the “search and account recovery” feature is useful.
Search and Account Recovery: Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. This has been especially useful for finding your friends in languages which take more effort to type out a full name, or where many people have the same name. In Bangladesh, for example, this feature makes up 7% of all searches.
However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. 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. We’re also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well. – READ MORE
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