Ex‑Meta employee under probe
Chilean authorities are investigating a former Meta employee accused of downloading 30,000 private Facebook user images without authorization. The report says prosecutors are examining the scope of the downloads and the alleged unauthorised access. (diarioestrategia.cl)
A former Meta employee in London is under criminal investigation after police said he downloaded about 30,000 private Facebook images without authorization. (engadget.com) Reports in the United Kingdom said the suspect allegedly wrote a program to bypass Meta’s internal security checks and pull images from users’ personal Facebook pages. The Metropolitan Police arrested him in November 2025 on suspicion of unauthorized access to computer material and later released him on bail. (thenextweb.com) Meta said it discovered the improper access more than a year ago, fired the employee, notified affected users, referred the case to law enforcement, and tightened its security measures. The company did not publicly identify the former employee. (telegraph.co.uk) The case centers on a basic problem in platform security: even when a company locks down outside hackers, a worker with internal access can still misuse that access. Prosecutors and police are examining not just the 30,000-image figure, but how the alleged tool worked and whether controls inside Meta failed to stop it sooner. (malwarebytes.com) It also lands after years of scrutiny over Facebook’s handling of personal data. In 2024, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta 251 million euros over a 2018 Facebook security breach that exposed information tied to about 29 million accounts. (reuters.com) The current investigation appears to involve an insider, not the earlier outside breach. That distinction matters for regulators because insider abuse tests a company’s employee monitoring, access limits, and audit trails rather than just its defenses against external attackers. (malwarebytes.com) News reports said London’s cybercrime unit is leading the criminal inquiry, and some accounts said United States investigators, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have also been involved. Meta said it is cooperating with law enforcement. (mashable.com) The immediate question is how many users were affected and what happened to the photos after they were downloaded. Until police finish the case, the clearest public facts are that Meta says it found the access, fired the employee, and referred the matter to authorities. (yahoo.com)
