Facebooked

The latest public dump of personal data comes from Facebook. This morning, I saw that someone had put up a site "Have I been Facebooked", and I visited to check my cell phone number. The query gave me my first and last initials, though no hint for gender or date of birth. "Have I been Facebooked" seems to have received a cease-and-desist, but "Have I Been Pwned" (HIBP) has the phone numbers loaded in, including mine. (HIBP is cagey, though, and does not offer initials etc.)

Now, I have not signed into Facebook more than a handful of times, and those involved setting up the account. Many years ago, a young man told us that it was creepy when people our age (parents of teenagers) were on Facebook. By now, I gather it is a boomer colony and the trend-setting young have moved on. Still, I don't want to use it, and never have. I signed up only to test the use of its authorization protocol for some web applications that we had. Once I learned that the web application did not just then support the use of Facebook authentication, I forgot Facebook.

But Facebook didn't forget me. My account was one of 500 million accounts to have data spilled. The good news, I guess, is that the data did not include an email address or password. Still, I wonder whether junk phone calls will start to ask for me by name.