
Meta wants researchers to help it avoid having users' personal data exposed online
CNN
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is asking for help in avoiding having personal data about its users scraped from its platforms and posted to the web.
The social media giant announced Wednesday that it is expanding its bug bounty program — which offers rewards for helping identify and fix vulnerabilities in its apps — to include scraping, in a move Meta (FB) is calling an "industry first" to address an "internet-wide" challenge.
Scraping is typically an automated process of extracting large amounts of data from websites. Even when this data is publicly available online, such as a username, it can potentially still be exploited by bad actors if it's lumped together with other personal information such as birthdates, email addresses and location. For that reason, many websites, including Meta's platforms, say they prohibit or limit scraping, although those rules aren't always followed.