The Japanese government's Personal Information Protection Commission urged Facebook on Monday to enhance users' personal data protection following recent security breaches.
TOKYO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd October, 2018) The Japanese government's Personal Information Protection Commission urged Facebook on Monday to enhance users' personal data protection following recent security breaches.
"As for the cases of illegal access [to personal data] that were announced in September this year, the company has to inform the commission on the reasons why the incident occurred, and also on the measures taken to prevent the repetition of the situation," the commission said in a statement.
On September 28, Facebook announced that nearly 50 million Facebook accounts were affected in a security breach that allowed hackers to use the "view as" feature to take control of some accounts. On October 12, Facebook said in a press release that around 30 million people out of the previously estimated 50 million actually had their access tokens stolen. The attackers accessed Names and contact details of the owners of half of the affected accounts, while in case of the other half, they accessed some other details specified in the profiles as well.
According to the commission, this breach might have affected around 100,000 Facebook users from Japan.
The commission cited another breach, saying that personal information, including the browsing history, was automatically transferred to Facebook when users were viewing websites with a Facebook "like" button. The commission went on to say that Facebook could access the data even if the user did not press the "like" button.
This is the first time the commission addresses Facebook with such kind of warning.
