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Image: Facebook

Facebook Dating made its much-anticipated debut in the US on September 5th, but concerns about its privacy issues have overshadowed the excitement in media coverage of the app.

Facebook was recently ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay about $5 billion in fines for privacy lapses, including its maligned partnership with Cambridge Analytica leading up to the 2016 elections. And most recently, the Attorneys General of eight different states have launched an anti-trust investigation of the company, specifically concerning the company’s privacy practices and purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Still, Facebook Dating is betting on its wealth of personal user data as a competitive advantage for creating better matches to directly compete with apps like Tinder. (Match Group saw its shares fall 5 percent on the day Facebook Dating was launched, a sign of investor concerns about the new competition.)

Phone numbers linked to the Facebook accounts of more than 419 million users have been found online thanks to an insecure server.

According to TechCrunch, the server contained records from multiple databases, including 133 million records on Facebook users in the United States, 18 million records of users in the United Kingdom, and over 50 million records on users in Vietnam. Each record contained a user’s Facebook ID - a unique number associated with every Facebook account, which can easily be used to ascertain the account owner’s name - as well as the phone number listed on the account. Some records also contained the user’s name, gender and location by country.

The server was not protected with a password, allowing anyone to find and access the database. Sanyam Jain, a security researcher from the non-profit organization GDI Foundation, discovered the database and reached out to TechCrunch when he was unable to identify the owner. TechCrunch confirmed the authenticity of a number of records in the database, but was also unable to find the owner.

Image: Facebook

Got a secret crush on someone in your friend circle? Facebook now has a feature for that. At its annual F8 developer conference, the social networking company unveiled the newest addition to its dating product: Secret Crush.

Secret Crush allows users to select up to nine Facebook friends they want to stealthily express interest in. Each user who is selected will receive a notification saying “A friend added you as a secret crush.” The sender’s name will not be revealed unless the recipient also puts the sender on their Secret Crush list. If a mutual crush occurs, Facebook will make the match and reveal the names. If their feelings are not reciprocated, the secret admirer’s identity will remain a secret.

Facebook Dating has just expanded its service to include two more countries: Mexico and Argentina.

The social media giant’s new dating platform launched in 2018, and was first introduced to Facebook users in Colombia, and then later in Canada and Thailand. Mexico and Argentina are the latest countries to join the rollout.

According to CNET, Facebook also revealed some new features it will be adding to its dating service soon. “Auto Profile Create” does just what it implies – it can automatically generate a profile for you by gathering photos and information from your existing Facebook account, making it easier to get started. Users have the ability to edit or remove information in the auto-generated profile, or they can opt to build one from scratch.

On Wednesday March 13, Facebook and its popular group of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp were unavailable to many users across the globe. While the company struggled to address what was happening, people were turning to other social media outlets like Twitter to express their frustration with the hashtag #FacebookDown.

Ironically, Facebook also had to turn to rival Twitter for help in communicating the issues as the problem persisted.

Instead of being able to post status updates and selfies, users were getting error messages. Advertisers who spent large amounts of money on promotions via Facebook apps were especially concerned by the length of the outage.

Countries affected by the outage included users in the United States, Europe, and Central and South America. Outages in the U.K. were especially widespread. Reports of outages in Asia began several hours later.

Users of the popular dating app Coffee Meets Bagel woke up to a surprise on Valentine’s Day. Instead of looking at matches, they were greeted with a notice from the company saying some of their personal data had been hacked.

According to a report from CNN, the data breach occurred a few days before on February 11, but CMB executives were trying to assess the situation and the extent of the damage. In their notice, the company stated that an “unauthorized party gained access to a partial list of user details.”

Their email goes on to say: “The affected information only includes your name and email address prior to May 2018. As a reminder, we never store any financial information or passwords.”