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If it wasn’t enough that Facebook employees had access to millions of user passwords, it gets worse. In its monthly’s blog post, Facebook revealed that millions of Instagram passwords were stored in a readable format. Through an internal investigation, Facebook determined that passwords stored were not internally abused or improperly accessed. However, this does add more pain to Facebook’s privacy issues it has been dealing with for some time now.
A Facebook spokesperson said the company learned that more Instagram passwords were exposed than originally estimated. Originally, Facebook thought that it would notify tens of thousands of Instagram users about the problems, but it turned out that millions of users were impacted.
In a statement, here is what Facebook said:
“This is an issue that has already been widely reported, but we want to be clear that we simply learned there were more passwords stored in this way. There is no evidence of abuse or misuse of these passwords.”
Facebook already came under fire for unintentionally saving email contacts of up to 1.5 million new users, and this can be added to a growing list of negatives for the company. Not only does Facebook have to reach out to millions of Facebook users whose passwords were stored in plain text, now the company will have to also reach out to users whose email lists were saved as well as impacted Instagram users.
