// Privacy NEWS // Millions of Facebook Passwords Exposed in a GDPR Investigation

The Irish Data Protection Commission has opened an investigation. Goal: to determine whether the hundreds of millions of passwords exposed in a readable format by Facebook constitute a violation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“The Data Protection Commission (DPC) was notified by Facebook that it had discovered that hundreds of millions of user passwords, relating to users of Facebook, Facebook Lite and Instagram, were stored by Facebook in plain text format in its internal servers,” the DPC said in a statement.

Internally searchable passwords

“We have this week commenced a statutory inquiry in relation to this issue to determine whether Facebook has complied with its obligations under relevant provisions of the GDPR,” it added last week.

The Irish Data Protection Commission is the responsible authority for Facebook under EU data legislation, which came into force in May 2018.

The social network acknowledged in March that an internal investigation had revealed that users' passwords were easily accessible to its employees, exposing them to abusive access. Facebook addressed this issue in an email statement.

"We are working with the IDPC on their inquiry. There is no evidence that these internally stored passwords were abused or improperly accessed.", says a Facebook spokesperson.

The investigation comes on the same day that the New York Attorney General’s office announces the opening of an investigation into the collection of courier contacts from 1.5 million users without their consent.

"It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement Thursday. "Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers' information while at the same time profiting from mining that data."

The regulatory authority in Canada has indicated that it will prosecute the U.S. firm for its privacy errors.

In addition, the US Federal Trade Commission also started investigating Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal for possibly violating a legal agreement it had with the federal government to keep user data private.

Finally, Facebook will pay for their lack of respect for its users! But will it be enough? I don't think so... information are the numeric gold and it worth a lot.

Sources : Cnet

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