Facebook has released a public statement clarifying the cause of and addressing some of the concerns related to the recent data leak. The company states that the information exposed was not obtained from an unsecured system but rather scraped from public profiles prior to September 2019. Almost every user record had a mobile phone number, a Facebook ID, a name, and the member’s gender associated with it. Facebook’s scapegoating of the data leak to web scraping has not sat well with everyone in the security community.
Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/facebook-attributes-533-million-users-data-leak-to-scraping-not-hacking/