Facebook removes exposed user records stored on Amazon cloud servers

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Facebook Inc.

said on Wednesday it had taken down the databases containing its user data from Amazon.com Inc ’s cloud servers after a report from cybersecurity firm UpGuard pointed to millions of exposed records.

UpGuard’s Cyber Risk team

said Mexico City-based digital platform Cultura Colectiva openly stored 540 million records on Facebook users , including identification numbers , comments , reactions , and account names .

Cultura Colectiva

said in a statement that all of its Facebook records came from user interactions with its three pages on Facebook and is the same information publicly accessible to anyone browsing those pages.

Cultura Colectiva informa: pic.twitter.com/1EaDvDvID5
— Cultura Colectiva (@CulturaColectiv) April 3, 2019

“Neither sensitive nor private data, like emails or passwords, were amongst those because we do not have access to that kind of data, so we did not put our users’ privacy and security at risk,” Cultura Colectiva said. “We are aware of the potential uses of data in current times , so we have reinforced our security measures to protect the data and privacy of our Facebook fan pages’ users.”

Another database, an app called At the Pool , listed names , passwords , and email addresses of 22,000 people , UpGuard said.

“We worked to get the databases in question taken down, but we are still investigating exactly what information was stored there,” a Facebook spokeswoman said, adding that the company’s policies prohibit storing user information in a public database .

Facebook has been hit by a number of privacy-related issues , with the latest being a glitch that exposed passwords of millions of users stored in readable format within its internal systems to its employees.

Last year, the company had come under fire following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data of millions of people’s Facebook profiles without their consent.