Half a billion Facebook users had their personal data leaked online and the company has no plans to notify them about it

Facebook reportedly has not alerted any of its more than half a billion users who recently had their personal data — including their names and phone numbers — leaked online in a data breach, and according to Reuters, the company has no plans to do so moving forward.

Business Insider first reported last week that the personal information of more than 530 million Facebook users had been made available in an unsecured public database. The exposed information included "phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses," Insider noted.

In a blog post responding to the news on Tuesday, Facebook said that the leaked user data was obtained by "malicious actors" in 2019 who used a "scraping" mechanism on a feature designed to help new users synch with friends on the platform.