Last month, Facebook admitted storing ‘tens of thousands’ of Instagram users’ passwords in plain text; a discovery made during a routine security review. Now the company says it was worse. Much worse.
In an update to an existing blog post about the issue (which also affected 600 million Facebook users), Facebook says it now estimates millions of Instagram users had their passwords exposed to Facebook employees.
“Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” the company wrote in the update. “We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed).”
Related: How to delete your Facebook account
Facebook’s decision to address this discovery in an update rather than a new post will be seen as evasive, but the company insists none of the stored passwords by abused by the employees with access to them.
In a follow up statement, the company added: “This is an issue that has already been widely reported, but we want to be clear that we simply learned there were more passwords stored in this way. There is no evidence of abuse or misuse of these passwords.”
The new information comes just a day after it emerged the company also saved the email contact lists of a million and a half newcomers to Facebook. Facebook is also going to reach out to those folks too. Another day, another email telling you Facebook mishandled or misused your personal data. When is enough going to be enough?
Have you quit Facebook as a result of the myriad of privacy violations currently miring the company’s efforts to connect the world? Let us know @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
