Perhaps you’re still delighted with the news that personal information from 533 million Facebook accounts has been made freely available online. But now there another a large amount of people’s data floating on the internet – including data from LinkedIn, confirmed the social network owned by Microsoft. And the potential scope of the leak is huge: an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was deleted 500 million LinkedIn profiles, by CyberNews.
In a supposed example of two million of the profiles for sale, the full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders and more of LinkedIn members were visible, CyberNews found. However, LinkedIn says the data contains information from many sites and is not all deleted from the professional network.
“We have investigated a suspected set of LinkedIn data offered for sale and determined that it is in fact an aggregation of data from a number of websites and businesses,” reads the statement from LinkedIn.
The company also claims that “LinkedIn’s no private member account data is included” – which may mean that the deleted data only contains information that you could see on someone’s public page. LinkedIn insists it was ‘not a LinkedIn infringement’, which would be technically true if the data were deleted rather than collected by a hacker intruding LinkedIn’s systems, but it does not do much for users who ‘s data is now sold on the Internet.
LinkedIn has yet to tell us if it notifies users whose data was in the dataset. (Facebook, in case you were wondering, does not intend to notify users if they are one of the people whose data was leaked.) If you want to see if your email address or phone number was part of the Facebook datalek, we have the instructions here.
The Italian privacy watchdog has launched an investigation into LinkedIn, he confirmed Bloomberg.