By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool, researchers found “the most extensive exposure of phone numbers” ever—along with profile photos and more.

By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool, researchers found “the most extensive exposure of phone numbers” ever—along with profile photos and more.

  • odelik@lemmy.todayEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    Security flaw?

    Sounds like a social media feature that somebody just discovered they could utilize to data scrape. Then they realized how much data was returned by the scraping.

    Similar things could (maybe still?) be done with Facebook graph api and Facebook graph search back in 2011.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      The exact same thing did happen on facebook and the feature was abused to indeed scrape phone numbers of facebook haha

  • C1pher@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    Funny how this happened SO CLOSE to them feeding WhatsApp data to their AI. This shit is a coverup so they can blame “leak” or “hack” when they start using and abusing information retrieved in private conversations.