FACEBOOK REMOVES ABILITY TO SEARCH BY PHONE NUMBERS A CRACKDOWN ON BREACHING OF PRIVACY

Facebook was named as accomplice in the Cambridge Analytica scandal(read here) including criminally obtaining data of users from social media giants for illegal use such as manipulation of results of elections... Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was summoned in the UK wherea committee of MPs are investigating the scandals of Cambridge Analytica and the likes.

It was common among users to search for friends because it's easy compared to names where language, spellings and the similarities makes it harder to narrow down search results.

The feature reportedly makes up seven per cent of all searches in Bangladesh.

Facebook explained people easily abuse this particular function hence it was pull down.

In a blog shared on behalf of the social media company, Mike Schoepfer, Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, wrote: 

"Malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery."

"Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."

"So we have now disabled this feature."