Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

According to a recent report by cyber security company UpGuard, two third-party developers of Facebook applications were found to store user data on Amazon's cloud servers in an open manner.

According to UpGuard, one of the companies, Cultura Colectiva, stores 146GB data on Amazon servers, which contains more than 540 million records, including comments, hobbies, behaviors, and account names. It is not clear how many users contain the data.

Another application called "At the Pool" is said to store 22000 unprotected Facebook passwords for users. Although the data is relatively small, it includes a lot of user information.

It is not clear how long the data has been made public, or who got the data from the server.

Chris Vickery, head of cyber risk research at UpGuard, said the data appeared to be collected through Facebook. Facebook allows third-party developers to integrate applications and websites with their platforms to achieve functions such as using Facebook login services.

The data were deleted after contacting Facebook, the researchers said.

"Facebook forbids storing Facebook information in public databases," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "We worked with Amazon to delete the database as soon as we were told. We are committed to working with developers to protect user data."

Still, Facebook faces strong criticism for sharing user data with third parties. Vickery told CNN that the incident highlighted the problems inherent in large-scale data collection.

"the data of Facebook users is far beyond what Facebook can control today," UpGuard researchers wrote in a past blog post. "Facebook combines large amounts of user data with often misconfigured storage technologies for public access, resulting in constant leakage of Facebook user data."

Last March, it emerged that Cambridge Analytica, a data company linked to Trump's presidential campaign, had unknowingly accessed the information of as many as 87 million Facebook users. Facebook has been under scrutiny ever since. In the same year, attackers used a vulnerability on the platform to disclose the information of nearly 50 million users.

This triggered strong criticism from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic of the company's data privacy leak, and in October 2018, British authorities announced a £500000 fine on Facebook for failing to protect user data, the highest fine in excess of the Cambridge Analytics scandal.

A large number of data leaks have put Facebook in a worse situation than ever before. On the one hand, social networks have no control over how third-party developers handle data and how they protect it. On the other hand, when this happens, although Facebook employees can stay out of it, it is Zuckerberg who ends up under fire.

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