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In an alarming revelation, he said that recent investigations into data privacy have revealed malicious actors cycling through hundreds of thousands of IP addresses in order to search for users by their phone numbers and scrape their public profile information.
Until now, users have had to opt out of making their profiles searchable by phone number. Most, Zuckerberg said, never opted out.
Though the CEO accepted blame for all of these data privacy and trust issues, saying, "It was my mistake," he also often put the onus on Facebook users to know better.
He mentioned, for instance, that the only information that bad actors would be able to scrape using a phone number was information that was public on Facebook user profiles.
Of the researcher who built the data-scraping app for Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg said, "Yes, he broke the policy, he broke people's expectations, but also, people chose to share that data with him."
And yet it was Zuckerberg and the company he built that made people's data privacy settings so open by default, and made it difficult to find, understand, and adjust those settings."
[ Poll: Is "open by default" congruent with "privacy by design"? ]
Source:
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-exposed-87-million-user...