Group networking giant Facebook said on Wednesday evening it may have “unintentionally uploaded” the email contacts of up to 1.5 million buyers on its site, without their permission or knowledge, when they signed up for new accounts since May 2016.
The reported incident is the latest in a hanker list of privacy concerns and controversies saddling the tech giant, which is facing increased government scrutiny.
Facebook daring strong public criticism after it was revealed that a U.K.-based political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, exploited the cast’s business model to influence the U.S. president election in 2016. Since then, Facebook has faced growing scrutiny from buyers and even employees as more privacy scandals were unveiled throughout 2018.
For his part, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called for stricter internet statute and for governments to take a more active role.
Last month we stopped offering email password verification as an opportunity for people verifying their account when signing up for Facebook for the first time. When we looked into the interferes people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people’s email associations were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account. We estimate that up to 1.5 million people’s email speak ti may have been uploaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone and we’re deleting them. We’ve fixed the underlying oppose and are notifying people whose contacts were imported. People can also review and manage the contacts they portion with Facebook in their settings
— CNBC’s Lauren Feiner contributed to this report.