Facebook Inc has inadvertently exposed 6 million users\u2019 phone numbers and email addresses to unauthorized viewers over the past year, the world\u2019s largest social networking company disclosed late Friday.<\/p>\n
Facebook blamed the data leaks, which began in 2012, on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide. As a result of the glitch, Facebook users who downloaded contact data for their list of friends obtained additional information that they were not supposed to have.<\/p>\n
Facebook\u2019s security team was alerted to the bug last week and fixed it within 24 hours. But Facebook did not publicly acknowledge the bug until Friday afternoon, when it published an \u201cimportant message\u201d on its blog explaining the issue.<\/p>\n
A Facebook spokesman said the delay was due to company procedure stipulating that regulators and affected users be notified before making a public announcement.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behavior on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing,\u201d Facebook said on its blog.<\/p>\n
While the privacy breach was limited, \u201cit\u2019s still something we\u2019re upset and embarrassed by, and we\u2019ll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again,\u201d it added.<\/p>\n
The breach follows recent disclosures that several consumer Internet companies turned over troves of user data to a large-scale electronic surveillance program run by U.S. intelligence.<\/p>\n
The companies include Facebook, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and Yahoo Inc.<\/p>\n
The companies, led by Facebook, successfully negotiated with the U.S. government last week to reveal the approximate number of user information requests that each company had received, including secret national security orders.<\/p>\n
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