Police are investigating a former Meta employee on suspicion that he had downloaded around 30,000 private Facebook images.
British court documents show the engineer is accused of designing a program to access photos while avoiding internal security checks.
A specialist detective from the Metropolitan Police cyber crime unit has launched a criminal investigation.
Facebook’s owner Meta confirmed that the suspected breach was discovered more than a year ago and said it had itself referred the matter to police.
The US-based social media giant said affected users have been notified and the employee has been terminated, while its security systems have also been upgraded.
The London-based engineer is on police bail while the investigation continues. A request to vary his bail conditions was recently accepted by Highbury Magistrates Court.
Court records say the employee is accused of “accessing and downloading approximately 30,000 private images belonging to Facebook users while working for Meta” and that she created a special computer script to do so.
“The security of user data is our top priority,” a Meta spokesperson said.
“After we discovered the inappropriate access by an employee a year ago, we immediately terminated the individual, notified users, referred the matter to law enforcement and enhanced our security measures.
“We are cooperating with the ongoing investigation.”
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meta – Together Google – Encountered one last month Historic court defeat in America After being found responsible for a woman’s social media addiction.
A jury in Los Angeles found Instagramwhich is owned by Meta, and youtubeThe Google-owned company was responsible for the damages caused to the 20-year-old girl – it paid her $6 million in damages.
Both Meta and Google said they disagree with the decision and plan to appeal.
The decision was seen as a precedent that could lead to hundreds more cases against social media companies for creating addictive algorithms.
In 2018, Facebook suffered a bug that is believed to have affected 6.8 million people and given third-party apps access to users’ photos.
Then in 2024 Meta, which also owns WhatsApp, was fined €91m by the Data Protection Commission in Ireland over the way millions of Facebook and Instagram user passwords were inadvertently stored on internal systems, meaning they were not protected by encryption.
