Facebook Admits 'Most' of Site's 2 Billion Users Compromised by 'Malicious Actors'

CommonDreams.com reports that Facebook has admitted that more user accounts may have been compromised than those announced during the company's most recent data scandal. Initial reports stated that approximately 51 million accounts were allegedly targeted in the Cambridge Analytica user data scandal, Facebook later clarified after an internal audit that the number was closer to 87 million, but it now seems that the company has admitted after further research that nearly all of Facebook's 2 billion accounts could have users personal info scraped from them by a variety of "malicious actors."

WIRED journalist Matt Burgess noted that Facebook's last statement on the data scandal briefly mentioned that "most" of the site's two billion users had personal info scraped from their Facebook profiles by "malicious actors."
Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer wrote in a company blog post: "Until today, people could enter another person's phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. 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."

Essentially, Facebook believes that over the course of many years, "malicious actors" used search features which Facebook has now disabled to collect information that users were unaware was allowed to be viewed publicly.
Kurt Walters, campaign director at Demand Progress, said on Wednesday that: "This is a crisis of trust. Mark Zuckerberg needs to demonstrate that Facebook users' wellbeing-not Facebook's profit line-is the company's number one priority. Facebook must stop the foot-dragging and immediately alert everyone whose personal data was compromised by Cambridge Analytica or other third parties."