Have I Been Facebooked?

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The site Have I Been Facebooked? after statements of the Privacy Guarantor has decided in advance to suspend the service. You can use the site Have I Been Pwned: haveibeenpwned.com. Remember to add the international prefix 0039 for Italian numbers.

Here we are talking about current affairs again. As you know we do it rarely, we are not a newspaper, and when we do it there is always a good reason. It's never about arriving "first". So let's immediately reveal the subject of this article: Have I Been Facebooked it is a website made by two Italians ¹ which will allow you to check if your phone number was inside the famous list which we talk about a lot these days.

Small explanation for those who don't know what we're talking about: in the past few days the news of a important online sale of 533 million Facebook profiles ² of which further 35 million were Italian users ³. A good summary, if you are interested, you can find it here.

As the good guy points out Arthur of Corinth (expert journalist Open source and digital rights) however it is quite strange how this thing has come out so forcefully only in recent days. The news in fact seems to be almost two months old. Probably the only difference between today and two months ago is that Previously the database was paidbut now it is free and available to anyone.

Have I Been Facebooked?

Therefore a gigantic database of over 500 million data, including telephone numbers. AND How to check if your phone number is among the stolen ones? Two Italians decided to create a website called Have I Been Facebooked? in the same style as the famous one Have I Been Pwned?. If you remember well, we talked about it a little while ago in the article How do I check if my data has been breached?

By entering your telephone number on the site Have I Been Facebooked? you will be able to find out very easily if it is part of that list.

Is my Facebook phone number stolen?

The source code of the site is entirely Open source, both the front-end ⁴ that the backend ⁵. The API used is also a open code ⁶. However how we already know it is impossible to know if what is circulating online is the same one released. However, having him released is generally a good sign of confidence.

However, the authors promise to never keep track of the telephone numbers searched for. They are also very active and stay even replying on Reddit to the proposals made to him to better protect the privacy of users already present in the database.

In our opinion, therefore, this eye can be trusted and can be a good, practical and quick method for check if our phone number is among the stolen ones.

ps: this is definitely an excellent opportunity to escape from sites that insistently ask for our telephone number "for our safety".

1. Post on r/italyinformatica[↩]
2. 533 million Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online[↩]
3. Facebook: 533 million data back online[↩]
4. source code front end[↩]
5. source code backend[↩]
6. source code APIs[↩]

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