Facebook faces formal Irish privacy probe into data leak

Facebook Inc. faces a formal probe by its main privacy regulator in the European Union following the leak of the personal data of more than half a billion users of the social media service.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission on Wednesday opened an inquiry following media reports earlier this month showing “that a collated dataset” of Facebook users’ personal data “had been made available on the internet,” the authority said in a statement.

Personal information on 533 million Facebook users reemerged on a hacker website in early April. The information included phone numbers and email addresses of users, the Irish regulator said in a statement earlier this month. Facebook has said the data is old and was already reported on in 2019.