NEW FACEBOOK INVESTIGATION

Ireland’s privacy agency is launching an investigation into a trove of information from roughly half a billion Facebook users that has been leaked and is circulating online.

“This dataset was reported to contain personal data relating to approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide,” the country’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) said in a release Wednesday.

“The DPC engaged with Facebook Ireland in relation to this reported issue, raising queries in relation to GDPR compliance to which Facebook Ireland furnished a number of responses,” it added.

A spokesperson for Facebook told The Hill the company is fully cooperating with the inquiry.

The origin of the data, which includes profile names, email addresses and phone numbers, is unclear.

The information was posted on an amateur hacking forum earlier this month, but the data appears to be older.

Facebook has said that the data was reported on in 2019 and that it has already patched the vulnerability that allowed the information to be scraped.