Facebook Says Data on Most of Its 2 Billion Users Is Vulnerable
- Malicious actors scraped users’ public profiles, company says
- Shares climb after CEO Zuckerberg defends ad-driven business
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Facebook Inc. said data on most of its 2 billion users could have been accessed improperly, giving fresh evidence of the ways the social-media giant failed to protect people’s privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the information.
The company said it removed a feature that let users enter phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook’s search tool to find other people. That was being used by malicious actors to scrape public profile information, it said.