The discovery arrives almost 18 months after Facebook, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, shut down a feature that allowed people to search for other people by their phone numbers. The company warned at the time that the data could have been scraped by malicious actors.
A Facebook spokesperson told CNN the data now in question was old and seemed to have been scraped before the phone-number search feature was shut down. “The dataset has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised,” the spokesperson said.