The latest privacy scandal to hit social network Facebook is that the company stores millions of user passwords in plain texts.
This means that employees of Facebook had access to people’s passwords, if you use Facebook or Instagram you should change your password now.
As part of a routine security review in January, we found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems. This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable. We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way.
Whilst the company has said that the passwords were not accessed by anyone outside of Facebook, it is not ideal that anyone who worked there could have seen peoples passwords.
To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users. Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook predominantly used by people in regions with lower connectivity.
The company is not having much luck with all of the privacy issues it has faced recently, you can find out more details over at their website at the link below.
Source Facebook