New Facebook User Data Scandal Pops Up, Exposes Risk Of Using ‘Login With Facebook’

Whenever people sign up for a new account online, they will likely encounter the option to do so using their Facebook account by choosing the option “Login With Facebook” provided by the site or client. According to a recent report, third-party JavaScript trackers can actually hijack these users’ data once they click on the option to sign up or log into some of these services.

The social network had already confirmed the existence of this issue to TechCrunch, noting that it is already investigating the matter. It basically involves these third-party elements stealing the personal information of the users that are available via their Facebook accounts, including their email addresses, age, location, gender, and profile photos.

“Scraping Facebook user data is in direct violation of our policies. While we are investigating this issue, we have taken immediate action by suspending the ability to link unique user IDs for specific applications to individual Facebook profile pages, and are working to institute additional authentication and rate limiting for Facebook Login profile picture requests,” Facebook told the publication.

As of right now, no one really knows what the perpetrators of these trackers are doing with the information that they got. The only thing that security researchers at Freedom To Tinker, know which is under the Center For Information Technology Policy at Princeton, is that the scraping is actually happening.

This development comes at an especially bad time for Facebook considering that it is still in the middle of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that it is smack at the center of. It’s going to take a long time for the social network to regain the trust of the public if it is ever even able to do so.

For now, users are advised to be careful when signing up for a new account at a website using their Facebook profiles. The same goes for when logging in.