Facebook has unintentionally uploaded email addresses of more than 1.
5 million new users since May 2016, the social media site said on Wednesday.
The company told Reuters that the contacts weren’t shared and they’re now being deleted, adding that the users whose email contacts were uploaded will also be notified.
The social media company has sparked outrage many times before by hitting privacy issues, including an incidence in which the passwords of millions of users were exposed to the employees.
Last year, Facebook came under fire when it was revealed that the personal data of millions of users was obtained by Cambridge Analytica without their consent.
In the latest glitch, the company told Business Insider that it didn’t upload the contacts intentionally.
Earlier this week, some 4,000 pages of highly sensitive documents were leaked, revealing Facebook’s internal deliberations over user data.
The documents, leaked to a British journalist who later shared them, span 2011 to 2015 and included presentations, emails, webchats, meeting summaries, and spreadsheets.
They revealed the company’s internal deliberations on whether they should sell user data to third-party app developers.
Though Facebook decided not to sell user data, the social media company agreed to provide it to app developers who shared their own valuable data or spend money on Facebook ads or the people who were personal ‘friends’ of Mark Zuckerberg.
According to an NBC report on the leaked documents, the company provided the user data to developers from some ‘certain’ companies including Amazon, Tinder, Microsoft, and Sony.
Facebook VP and Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewald told MailOnline in a statement that documents were ‘cherry picked’ as part of a lawsuit against the company, and that they only tell one side of the story.
‘The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story and omits important context,’ Grewald said.
‘The documents were selectively leaked as part of what the court found was evidence of a crime or fraud to publish some, but not all, of the internal discussions at Facebook at the time of our platform changes.
‘But the facts are clear: we’ve never sold people’s data.’
However, the documents revealed that privacy was not considered a big issue as Facebook’s executives debated how to handle third-party access to their user data.
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