An investigation is underway into whether the leak of 533 million Facebook users’ personal data shows evidence that the social media giant violated European data breach disclosure rules.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said on Tuesday that it was looking into the leak, which saw Facebook users’ phone numbers, full names, locations, email addresses, and other biographical information leaked for free in a low-level hacking forum.
In their official press release, the regulator wrote that Facebook had told the commission that the data was collected between June 2017 and April 2018, before the General Data Protection Regulation went into effect. The regulation went into effect in May 2018, requiring companies to report data breaches to authorities within 72 hours.
Facebook Product Management Director Mike Clark reiterated that stance in a blog post on Tuesday, reports Law 360, where he said that the data had been scraped from its platform before September 2019 by “malicious actors.”
However, the DPC — which acts as Facebook’s lead EU privacy watchdog — wrote that the data leaked seemed to include files possibly from a later period, and the commission said that a significant number of those affected by the leak were located in the EU, according to Law 360.
The DPC has not taken any enforcement action against Facebook under the General Data Protection Regulation despite having pending cases that date back to 2018 — including a data coercion case, according to Law 360.
In March, a parliamentary committee found that Facebook and fellow tech giant Google were making money off the pension scam industry by showing ads on their platforms placed by fraudsters. Rocio Concha, Director of Policy and Advocacy at consumer protection group Which?, said that despite having some of the most sophisticated technology in the world, the tech giants were failing to utilise it to prevent scammers from abusing the platforms by using fake and fraudulent content on an industrial scale to target victims and devastate lives.
Also this year, a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook alleging personal data remains unprotected from outside apps. At least one million Facebook users in the United Kingdom are taking part in class action.
Filed in London’s High Court in February, lead plaintiff and journalist Peter Jukes alleges in the class action that Facebook allowed a third-party to secretly scrape private data from user accounts and networks without their permission. This will be the second such legal action against Facebook in the U.K. relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal starting in 2018.
Facebook agreed to pay £500,000 in Oct. 2019 after an investigation found these third-party apps had free reign over personal data within Facebook’s system, the Evening Express reports.
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