If you've ever been like me, I've always been a little nervous to put my info out there especially on social media like Facebook and for a good reason too. This kind of confirms my fears about Facebook...
From Forbes:
Over the weekend, news broke that a hacker had published online a database containing the personal information of 533 million Facebook users, including email and physical addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and more. While the data was stolen in a 2019 breach and Facebook long ago plugged that hole, it’s the first time this huge trove was made available for free.
If you have a Facebook account (or if you had one in 2019 that you’ve deactivated), you should be concerned. And now you can find out if your private information has been made very public.
Have I Been Pwned?, a site that lets users search databases from dozens of breaches, has added the Facebook dataset to its collection. Go to the site’s home page and enter any addresses you use with Facebook to see if they’re included. And yes, it’s safe to do so. Have I Been Pwned is a well-established site and its operator, Troy Hunt, is a regional director for Microsoft in Australia.
Hunt was able to find more than 2.5 million email addresses in the database, according to details on the Have I Been Pwned home page.
The site also lets you search to see if your password has been found in a data breach, and because the Facebook data includes phone numbers, Hunt has been debating whether to add a phone number search feature as well.