### Facebook's memory will not fade - the spring (2021) when 500 million people's personal information was exposed.

### Facebook's memory will not fade - the spring (2021) when 500 million people's personal information was exposed.

In April 2021, the world's largest social networking service, Facebook (now Meta), revealed a shocking incident in which the personal information of more than 533 million people was leaked and released for free on a hacker forum. Extremely personal information such as names, phone numbers, places of residence, and places of employment were targeted, causing anxiety among users around the world.

The data was actually collected in 2019 due to a flaw in Facebook's "Contact Sync" feature, which Facebook claimed was "old data that has been corrected," but even the "old" information was still available for misuse.

The context of this time period was the pandemic's shift to people's online-dependent lifestyles: social networking sites were becoming more like public spaces, but the privacy vulnerabilities that existed there were serious. In addition, since the Cambridge Analytica incident in 2018, Facebook's data management posture has been under intense criticism, highlighting the lack of efforts to prevent a recurrence.

In particular, in the EU, the Irish Data Protection Commission has launched an investigation, including possible violations of the GDPR. This was an opportunity for the world to once again closely watch the handling of the vast amount of personal information held by global companies.

Once information is online, it can never be "past," and the Facebook case was a symbolic reminder of how our digital existence can carry an irretrievable trail.