Could Your Facebook Photos Have Been Downloaded by a Meta Worker?
Nowadays, the majority of people have moved away from using Facebook, unless they need to do so for work purposes.
Instead, it is thought of as the social media platform for the Boomer generation, with most people used to their mums and dads using it to keep in touch with friends or go down conspiracy theory-based rabbit holes, or share years old memes.
Still, there is a concern for those that have been using the platform in recent times that they might have had their photos downloaded by a former Meta worker who is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police for downloading tens of thousands of private photos posted to the Meta-owned company.
What’s Happened?
A former employee of Meta is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of having downloaded around 30,000 private photographs that were uploaded to the Facebook social media platform.
An engineer for the company who lives in London, hence the Met’s involvement, he is thought to have designed a platform that allowed him access to personal pictures uploaded to the site without the need to go through any security checks. The breach was discovered by Meta more than a year ago.
A former Meta employee suspected of downloading around 30,000 private images of Facebook users is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police.
Police say the employee, a company engineer, allegedly designed a script that allowed his activity to go undetected by internal… pic.twitter.com/gpth0FEfXj
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Upon discovery of the situation, Meta reportedly fired the individual involved and contacted law enforcement agencies in order to allow them to handle it. That resulted in officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Cybercrime Unit getting involved, having been given a referral about the matter by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It is the latest in a line of security issues that Meta is having to deal with, having been fined €265 million in the November of 2022 when the Irish Data Protection Commission found that hundreds of millions of users had had their personal details leaked.
You’ll Know if Your Photos Were Downloaded
The good news for anyone worried about an invasion of their privacy is that Meta has already been in contact with the Facebook users who had their images taken by the engineer in question. In other words, unless you’ve had contact from Meta in some form or another, the likelihood is that your photos are safe.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Facebook is safe to use. In the March of this year, jurors on a trial in California found that Meta, alongside the owners of YouTube, had deliberately built an addictive social media platform.
In the September of 2024, the DPC found that Meta had ‘inadvertently’ stored some passwords of social media users on its internal systems, storing them there without any encryption, which resulted in a fine of €91 million being issued.
It is yet another example of how the Mark Zuckerberg-owned platform might be one that you should steer clear of, which was made clear to anyone who watched the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma. That film laid bare the manner in which algorithms were manipulated by Facebook to influence the likes of elections.