Irish privacy watchdog opens Facebook data breach probe

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Ireland’s privacy watchdog has started an investigation into the massive data breach on Facebook which was disclosed last week. The Irish Data Protection Commission said Wednesday that it will look into whether the U.S. social media company complied with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation that the European Union (EU) passed earlier this year. Under the GDPR rules, companies found with wrongdoings could be hit with fines of up to 20 million euros or 4 percent of annual global turnover. EU users are empowered under the rules to take litigation against companies if they have been affected.

Facebook announced on Sept. 28 that its 50 million users could be directly affected by a security bug found by its security team. The company said its security engineers discovered “attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted ‘View As’, a feature that enables people to see what their own profile looks like to someone else.” The security issue could let hackers steal Facebook access tokens used by Facebook users as login digital keys and then take control of their accounts.