Facebook takes Vietnamese people's information too easily

In an article on April 4, Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer revealed that Vietnam ranked 9th out of 10 countries with the most Facebook users whose information was leaked, with 427,446 accounts leaked.

This continues to raise concerns among many Facebook users.in Vietnam.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg - Photo: Reuters

Everything is... public.

Talk toYouthOn April 6, Ms. Vo Duong Tu Diem said that more than 425,000 Vietnamese users had their personal information that they agreed to share when using Cambridge Analytica's application as well as the information Facebook provided to this company exposed.

It can be public information on personal Facebook, nationality, interests, place of birth, age, fields of study.area of ​​interest...

"It is worth mentioning that the purpose of using the collected user data of Cambridge Analytica is mainly in the United States. Therefore, it can be assumed that the number of Vietnamese people who fell into the trap of Cambridge Analytica mentioned above may have been unintentional (for example, due to setting up US citizenship or residence in the US...).

If Cambridge Analytica had the intention of exploiting Vietnamese users, I believe they could have collected tens of millions of users very easily, because the majority of Vietnamese users are very subjective when using Facebook, not just a few hundred thousand as announced by Facebook" - Ms. Diem analyzed.

As introduced, cybersecurity experts have summarized 4 risks of losing accounts and exposing private data of Vietnamese users when participating in Facebook.

Firstly, private information posted by users on social networks, such as phone numbers, ID cards, passports, home addresses, personal photos and videos...

Second are applications that take control of phones and steal users' Facebook account passwords.

Third are scams in the form of text messages informing users that they have won a valuable prize and asking them to enter their Facebook account and bank account information on a website.

And the fourth is malware that spreads through the network.

Be careful when making friends

425,000 Vietnamese users had their personal information exposed that they agreed to share.

From the above risks, Mr. Nguyen Minh Duc, director of CyRadar Cyber ​​Security Company, said that limiting the possibility of personal information being leaked is mainly due to the user's decision.

"If users do not want to reveal too much information, they can choose to close the public mode, only letting their friends see it. They can also limit the information provided about their location, time, habits...

Users should also not easily install new applications following trends, not install applications of unknown origin and especially should carefully check the access rights to personal information of applications before installing.

At the same time, users should not make friends and agree to all friend requests and invitation messages from strangers via Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Always be suspicious when your chat friends make suspicious requests..." - Mr. Duc advised.

In addition, users also need to know some of the privacy policy improvements that Facebook has just announced to proactively modify their personal data usage rights.

Users should also not easily install new applications following the trend.

The new privacy shortcuts system provides clearer explanations of how Facebook handles its operations, allowing users to control their data more easily and in more detail.

To avoid having their personal information exposed, Facebook users can use the Access Your Information feature to delete anything they want on their timeline or personal profile on Facebook.

Users can also download what they've shared on Facebook and transfer it to another service if they want.