30,000 private Facebook images allegedly downloaded by Meta employee – Malwarebytes

Every tech company tells you your data is safe. They’ve (hopefully) got encryption, access controls, and zero-trust architectures—the whole glossy security brochure. And then someone on the inside writes a script to steal your private photos anyway. That’s what a former Meta employee based in London is under criminal investigation for. He allegedly downloaded around 30,000 private images belonging to Facebook users. The Metropolitan Police’s cybercrime unit is handling the case. According to court papers, the accused didn’t just browse around; he built a custom script designed to circumvent Meta’s internal detection systems. Meta says it discovered the breach over a year ago, fired the individual, notified affected users, and referred the matter to UK law enforcement. The suspect is currently on police bail and must report to officers in May. Meta’s track record on data protection is far from spotless. It agreed to pay $725 million in 2022 to settle a class-action lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where third-party developers harvested data from millions of Facebook users. Stories keep surfacing about Meta that give us pause when considering privacy and user safety. For example, Facebook engineers have admitted that they didn’t even know where user data was kept.
Read More