There's a high chance you, or someone you know, were part of it.
Over the past number of days, it was revealed that the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users around the world has been leaked online, including 1.5 million users from Ireland.
The Facebook leak affects 533 million people worldwide and saw mobile phone numbers, email addresses and other personal details emerge on internet forums.
The leak occurred in 2019 but is serious enough that the Irish Data Protection Commission is looking into the matter, although it's unlikely there will be any real sanctions for Facebook.
For those of us who might still have the same full name, birth date, mobile number, physical address, or email address that we did in 2019, this leaked data is still sensitive.
If you put some time into it, you could quickly find a copy of the data leaked online and discover the names, mobile numbers, email addresses and even the location data of those affected.
One quick question you will have is, how to check whether or not
you are part of the breach.
While it's not advisable to be going around putting your details into random sites online, there are some which are trustworthy where you can find out if your data has been compromised.
To check, it's a simple matter of visiting
Have I Been Pwned and entering your email address or phone number.
It's important to note that if you're filling in your Irish number, you have to put 353 before it. For example, for the number 0876153478 (which is completely made up), you would type in 353876153478.
