After the revelation of a data breach of more than 530 million users dating back to 2019, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on Wednesday the opening of an investigation into the social network Facebook.
The Irish regulator, equivalent to the French CNIL, will seek to know if the American digital giant has respected its obligations in terms of data control, according to a press release.
Facebook has its European headquarters in Ireland and it is therefore up to the Irish regulator to conduct the investigation for the European Union (EU).
The DPC says it has spoken with Facebook about the incident and believes that it is possible that there may have been a breach of the EU's general data protection regulation, which the investigation will have to determine.
A "malicious" hacking
This pirated data was partly published on a hacker forum in early April and is the work of "malicious actors", Facebook explained last week.
This data comes from a leak that dates back to 2019 and "has been resolved", according to the group which urges its members to better protect their accounts.
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Facebook has denounced the method of "scraping" or looting the profiles of its Internet users via software that mimics the functionality of the network which helps members easily find friends and thus scrapes contact lists.
The publication of these phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth on a hacker forum had been spotted by the Business Insider site.
This is not the first time that data from millions of users of the first social network, which has nearly 2.8 billion monthly users, has been posted online.
Revealed in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a British firm that hijacked the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users for political propaganda purposes, had permanently tarnished the reputation of the social network on the issue of data privacy.
