Another Facebook data leak exposed sensitive information on 3 million users

Another Facebook personality quiz has left the personal data of around 3 million users exposed, New Scientist reported Monday.

A third-party app gathered sensitive information on Facebook users and distributed it to researchers without proper security precautions, echoing the recent Cambridge Analytica breach that allowed a data firm to improperly access personal data on about 87 million users. The app, myPersonality, was suspended April 7, but the data was available to anyone on the web for the past four years, New Scientist reports.

University of Cambridge researchers collected data from more than 6 million people, who completed intimate personality quizzes that also gathered information on users' location, age, gender, and Facebook status updates. Around half of those users, 3.1 million, allowed myPersonality to share their data with the research project. More than 280 people from nearly 150 institutions were allowed to access the full data set, and New Scientist reports that anyone could find and deanonymize the data with a simple web search.

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Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist who was at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was involved with the myPersonality project until 2014. Facebook suspended the app as a part of a sweeping investigation into third-party apps on the platform, announcing Monday that around 200 had been shut out. Read more at New Scientist.