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Apple has shown off its latest product line-up in its first big event of 2021.

The firm is increasing the number of products which will contain its own in-house developed M1 chip, as the sector struggles with a global semiconductor shortage.

It finally unveiled its much-anticipated tracker tile, the AirTag, which will launch at the end of April.

And it announced its first significant update to the iconic iMac desktop computer in recent years.

It also showcased a new iPad Pro, complete with M1 chip and 5G connectivity.

What was not discussed, but was later shared by Apple, was the roll-out of the latest version of its operating system, iOS 14.5, which will include a controversial update limiting what app owners can see about user activity outside of their own apps without permission.

It’s a popular business model for “free” internet services, including Facebook, which use the data they gather on their members’ online habits to target advertising.

AirTags

AirTags have been highly-anticipated by Apple fans. They are small round disks which can be attached to anything, and transmit a Bluetooth signal to a home gadget – an iPad or iPhone – to alert the user to their location.

The original Tile tracker, a rival product, launched following a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2014.

AirTags will cost £29 ($29 in US) and are due to launch on April 30, said Apple engineering program manager Carolyn Wolfman-Estrada. They work with all devices containing the U1 chip, which includes the iPhone 11 (which launched in 2019) and later models.

She also said they were designed to “track items not people”, with features such as rotating identifiers and audible alerts from unknown tags built in to protect privacy.

Colleen Novielli showed off new super-thin iMacs in seven different colours, built with Apple’s new M1 chip, and a 24in, 11.3 million pixel screen, along with a revamped camera and other upgrades. One of Apple’s older products, the iMac has not seen a significant revamp for years.

However, it only has a top RAM (the device’s short-term memory) of 16GB, putting it on a par with the older Mac Mini.

“It is little surprise Apple has resisted updating the iMac over the last few years, given the transformational impact the M1 architecture has had on the overall design,” commented Leo Gebbie from CCS insight.

“This is an endorsement of Apple’s multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment in creating its own silicon platforms which now power all its key devices.”

5G comes to iPad
The M1 chip, an ultra-wide camera and 5G data connectivity are all coming to the new iPad Pro, said product manager Raja Bose.

The M1 chip will make the latest version’s graphics performance 1,500 times faster than the original, he said, in a presentation which focused on the iPad’s graphics and gaming benefits.

The new model will also feature up to 2 terabytes of storage.

According to analysts IDC, the tablet market overall grew in 2020 for the first time in seven years, with sales driven by consumers and education providers during the global pandemic.

“Tablets emerged as a reliable alternative for consumers to meet their needs for content consumption and provide access to remote schooling during the lockdown,” said Daniel Goncalves from IDC.

Mr Goncalves added that many households had bought extra tablets in the last 12 months, in order to keep up with their increased use.

Apple also announced a new subscription podcast platform, in keeping with its move towards streaming services, first announced in 2019.

And it showed off a new 4K Apple TV, with a re-designed Siri remote and HDR (High Dynamic Range). HDR offers a greater range of colours, making pictures more vivid and realistic. Sky launched an HDR service last year for a selection of its nature documentaries – but only to customers with specific premium subscriptions.

This launch wasn’t exactly chock-a-block with surprises.

The move to Apple’s own silicon has so far been a success.

The new M1 chip Macbooks have had rave reviews – so it was only a matter of time before Apple switched its other products over to the new design.

The new iMacs and iPads will be the fastest and most powerful ever – though it would of course be preposterous if they weren’t.

Interestingly Apple also announced it’s much speculated AirTags.

You’ll be able to attach it to your keys or your dog’s collar, anything. If you lose them, you’ll be able to find it using your phone.

This looks very much like a product already on the market, Tile – though AirTags appears at first view to have a different tracking system.

This is another example in the long line of Big Tech companies borrowing/copying ideas from smaller companies, and it’s these kinds of moves that many US lawmakers don’t like.

And this launch was interesting too for what wasn’t discussed.

It was speculated that Apple might launch its new app tracking transparency feature – and we now know the latest version of its operating system, iOS 14.5, is due out next week.

Apple wants to limit how companies follow you on the internet on Apple devices. It says it wants to protect its customer’s privacy.

Platforms like Facebook, that relies heavily on ad revenue, is against the move.

However this evening’s event was all about the products.

The government is to allow taller and wider mobile phone masts to be built across the English countryside to speed up the 5G network rollout.

Parliament will vote on the plans, which the government says would improve rural coverage, while “minimising any visual impact” on the landscape.

Masts on public land have been limited to 20m (66ft) tall, but new masts can be up to 30m, and existing ones 25m.

Mobile firms will need permission from local councils to build new masts.

Stricter rules will apply in protected areas, including national parks, conservation areas and areas of outstanding natural beauty.

Some people are opposed to mobile phone masts because of their appearance.

Last month, one resident of the village of Scholes in West Yorkshire branded its two new 20m 5G masts an “absolute eyesore”. Local councillor Kath Pinnock said the fact that planning permission had not been required for them amounted to an attack on democratic rights.

The government launched a consultation on the plans in 2019. Former culture secretary Nicky Morgan said at the time that there had to be “a balance struck” between landscape and connectivity.

5G uses higher frequency waves so more devices can be connected to it, and have faster internet speeds.

However, they require more transmitter masts to enable the technology.

Mobile firms will be “incentivised” to focus on improving existing masts rather than building new ones, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said.

“We want to level up the country and end the plague of patchy and poor mobile signals in rural communities,” said Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden.

“These practical changes strike a careful balance between removing unnecessary barriers holding back better coverage, while making sure we protect our precious landscape.”

New or improved masts will help deliver the government’s £1bn Shared Rural Network plans.

The government has committed to extending 4G coverage to 95% of the UK – regardless of which network customers use – by 2025.

Leading mobile operators EE, O2, Three and Vodafone will share network equipment and build new masts as part of the scheme.

Mobile UK, which represents the four networks, welcomed the proposals and said the legislative changes should be brought “as quickly as possible” to ensure “ambitious targets” were met.

The proposals include:

Existing mobile masts to be strengthened without prior approval, so that they can be upgraded for 5G
In unprotected areas, mast increases can be up to a maximum of 25m (previously 20m)
Greater height increases will also be permitted, subject to approval by the local authority
New masts can be built up to five metres higher – a maximum of 30m in unprotected areas and 25m in protected areas, subject to approval by the planning authority
‘Digital divide’
The changes are long overdue and will help to address a “worrying digital divide” in rural communities, CCS Insight analyst Kester Mann said.

“Dated planning laws have hindered mobile network deployment for years,” he added. “Taller masts enable signals to travel further, providing coverage to residents and visitors over a wider area.

“But it is vital to strike the right balance between improving connectivity and preserving the beauty of the countryside.”

Quality of life
Paul Lee, global head of research at Deloitte, said: “Since the pandemic started, voice calls have been upgraded to video calls; 2G is fine for the former but cannot support the higher bandwidth video conference call, but 4G can.

“4G in rural areas would enable not just consumers to be more connected, but for its residents to have more options to work from rural locations, offering most likely a better quality of life.

“Essential services such as healthcare could also be delivered over a 4G network more readily than a 2G one.”

Safety regulators in the US have urged owners of a Peloton treadmill to stop using the product “immediately” if they have children or pets in the home.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says it is aware of 39 incidents including one death, involving the Peloton Tread+.

Peloton had already confirmed the death last month and said children should stay away from the machines.

On Saturday, Peloton called the CPSC’s warning “inaccurate and misleading”.

Peloton sells cycling machines and treadmills that can be connected online to virtual fitness classes. Its business has boomed as people look for alternative ways to exercise during lockdowns and gym closures.

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The CPSC issued the “urgent warning” on Saturday, releasing video footage of a child being dragged under one of the machines.

It said the machine posed “serious risks to children for abrasions, fractures, and death”.

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The CPSC said it believed at least one of the 39 incidents occurred while a parent was running on the treadmill. It also warned that children could be seriously injured while the Tread+ is being used by an adult and not just during cases where children have been left unsupervised.

The regulator advised owners of the machine to use it only in a locked room and to keep objects such as exercise balls away from it.

Peloton said in a press release that the machine was “safe for members to use in their homes and comes with safety instructions and warnings to ensure its safe use”.

“Like all motorised exercise equipment, the Tread+ can pose hazards if the warnings and safety instructions are not followed,” it added.

The company told owners of the machine not to let children under the age of 16 use the treadmill and to keep children, pets, and objects away from the Tread+ at all times.

Facebook users whose data was compromised by a massive data leak are being urged to take legal action against the tech giant.

About 530 million people had some personal information leaked, including, in some cases, phone numbers.

A digital privacy group is preparing to take a case to the Irish courts on behalf of EU citizens affected.

Facebook denies wrongdoing, saying the data was “scraped” from publicly available information on the site.

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Antoin Ó Lachtnain, director of Digital Rights Ireland (DRI), warned other tech giants its move could be the beginning of a domino effect.

“This will be the first mass action of its kind but we’re sure it won’t be the last,” he said.

“The scale of this breach, and the depth of personal information compromised, is gob-smacking.”

He added: “The laws are there to protect consumers and their personal data and it’s time these technology giants wake up to the reality that protection of personal data must be taken seriously.”

Was your number leaked in Facebook data breach?
Facebook faces investigation over data breach
DRI claims Facebook failed to protect user data and notify those who had been affected.

The data leak was first discovered and fixed in 2019, but was recently made easily available online for free.

DRI said individual users who take part in the legal action could be offered compensation of up to €12,000 (£10,445) if it is successful – based on what it says are similar cases in other countries.

‘Domino effect’
“If successful this could well set a precedent and open the door to further class action down the line,” Ray Walsh, a digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy, told the BBC.

“Big Tech might then find that being made to compensate individual users is a strong reminder to work harder on privacy compliance,” he added.

On Thursday, the Irish Data Protection Commission announced its decision to launch an investigation into the leak.

It will assess whether any parts of the GDPR or Data Protection Act 2018 were infringed by Facebook.

If found to be in breach, the social media giant could face fines of up to 4% of its turnover.

Responding to DRI’s legal case, a Facebook spokesman said: “We understand people’s concerns, which is why we continue to strengthen our systems to make scraping from Facebook without our permission more difficult and go after the people behind it.”

He also pointed to other firms involved in similar recent leaks.

“As LinkedIn and Clubhouse have shown, no company can completely eliminate scraping or prevent data sets like these from appearing. That’s why we devote substantial resources to combat it and will continue to build out our capabilities to help stay ahead of this challenge,” he said.

The use of facial recognition for surveillance, or algorithms that manipulate human behaviour, will be banned under proposed EU regulations on artificial intelligence.

The wide-ranging proposals, which were leaked ahead of their official publication, also promised tough new rules for what they deem high-risk AI.

That includes algorithms used by the police and in recruitment.

Experts said the rules were vague and contained loopholes.

The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security.

The suggested list of banned AI systems includes:

those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions …causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment
AI systems used for indiscriminate surveillance applied in a generalised manner
AI systems used for social scoring
those that exploit information or predictions and a person or group of persons in order to target their vulnerabilities
European policy analyst Daniel Leufer tweeted that the definitions were very open to interpretation.

“How do we determine what is to somebody’s detriment? And who assesses this?” he wrote.

For AI deemed to be high risk, member states would have to apply far more oversight, including the need to appoint assessment bodies to test, certify and inspect these systems.

And any companies that develop prohibited services, or fail to supply correct information about them, could face fines of up to 4% of their global revenue, similar to fines for GDPR breaches.

High-risk examples of AI include:

systems which establish priority in the dispatching of emergency services
systems determining access to or assigning people to educational institutes
recruitment algorithms
those that evaluate credit worthiness
those for making individual risk assessments
crime-predicting algorithms
Mr Leufer added that the proposals should “be expanded to include all public sector AI systems, regardless of their assigned risk level”.

“This is because people typically do not have a choice about whether or not to interact with an AI system in the public sector.”

As well as requiring that new AI systems have human oversight, the EC is also proposing that high risk AI systems have a so-called kill switch, which could either be a stop button or some other procedure to instantly turn the system off if needed.

“AI vendors will be extremely focussed on these proposals, as it will require a fundamental shift in how AI is designed,” said Herbert Swaniker, a lawyer at Clifford Chance.

Sloppy and dangerous
Meanwhile Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation at University College London, highlighted a clause that will force organisations to disclose when they are using deepfakes, a particularly controversial use of AI to create fake humans or to manipulate images and videos of real people.

He also told the BBC that the legislation was primarily “aimed at vendors and consultants selling – often nonsense- AI technology to schools, hospitals, police and employers”.

But he added that tech firms who used AI “to manipulate users” may also have to change their practices.

With this legislation, the EC has had to walk a difficult tightrope between ensuring AI is used for what it calls “a tool… with the ultimate aim of increasing human wellbeing”, and also ensuring it doesn’t stop EU countries competing with the US and China over technological innovations.

And it acknowledged that AI already informed many aspects of our lives.

The European Centre for Not-for-Profit Law, which had contributed to the European Commission’s White Paper on AI, told the BBC that there was “lots of vagueness and loopholes” in the proposed legislation.

“The EU’s approach to binary-defining high versus low risk is sloppy at best and dangerous at worst, as it lacks context and nuances needed for the complex AI ecosystem already existing today.

“First, the commission should consider risks of AI systems within a rights-based framework – as risks they pose to human rights, rule of law and democracy.

“Second, the commission should reject an oversimplified low-high risk structure and consider a tier-based approach on the levels of AI risk.”

The details could change again before the rules are officially unveiled next week. And it is unlikely to become law for several more years.

An update to England and Wales’s contact tracing app has been blocked for breaking the terms of an agreement made with Apple and Google.

The plan had been to ask users to upload logs of venue check-ins – carried out via poster barcode scans – if they tested positive for the virus. This could be used to warn others.

The update had been timed to coincide with the relaxation of lockdown rules.

But the two firms had explicitly banned such a function from the start.

Under the terms that all health authorities signed up to in order to use Apple and Google’s privacy-centric contact-tracing tech, they had to agree not to collect any location data via the software.

As a result, Apple and Google refused to make the update available for download from their app stores last week, and have instead kept the old version live.

When questioned, the Department of Health declined to discuss how this misstep had occurred.

Scotland has avoided this pitfall because it released a separate product – Check In Scotland – to share venue histories, rather than trying to build the functionality into its Protect Scotland contact-tracing app.

Virus hotspots
NHS Covid-19’s users have long been able to scan a QR code when entering a shop, restaurant or other venue to log within the app the fact that they had visited.

But this data has never been accessible to others.

Instead, it has only come into use if local authorities have identified a location as being a virus hotspot by other means, and flagged the fact to a central database.

Since each phone regularly checks the database for a match, it can alert the owner if they need to take action as a consequence, without sharing the information with others.

However, this facility has rarely been used, in part because prior to the most recent lockdown, many local authorities were confused about what they were supposed to do.

Before shops reopened in England and Wales on Monday, along with outdoor hospitality venues in England, the intention had been to automate the process.

This would have involved users who had tested positive being asked if they were willing to upload their logs.

Depending on the thresholds set – for example, how many infected users registered having visited the same place on the same day – other app users would then have been told to either monitor their symptoms or immediately get a test, whether they felt ill or not.

The Department of Health had described this as being a “privacy-protecting” approach.

But despite being opt-in, it was still a clear breach of the terms that health chiefs had agreed to when they switched to adopting Apple and Google’s contact tracing API (application programming interface) in June 2020. This was after their original effort was found to miss too many potential cases of contagion.

Setting a precedent
The tech firms’ Exposure Notifications System FAQ states that apps involved must “not share location data from the user’s device with the public health authority, Apple, or Google”.

And a separate document covering the terms and conditions in more detail says that “a contact tracing app may not use location-based APIs… and may not collect any device information to identify the precise location of users”.

Had Apple and Google made an exception for England and Wales in this case, it could have set a precedent for other countries to have sought changes of their own.

The team behind the app was told not to disclose why the update had failed to be released on schedule.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health told the BBC: “The deployment of the functionality of the NHS Covid-19 app to enable users to upload their venue history has been delayed.

“This does not impact the functionality of the app and we remain in discussions with our partners to provide beneficial updates to the app which protect the public.”

A spokeswoman for the Welsh government said it had nothing to add.

Apple has indicated it wants to work out a solution.

Just a week ago, the Department of Health seemed to think this update to the app would go through without problems.

It’s hard to understand why. After all, the rules for using the Apple-Google Exposure Notification System were clear – collecting any location data was a no-no.

The app team knew that when they switched to it last summer, having discovered that going it alone with their own system was just not practical.

But they may have assumed that, because the sharing of locations by users was optional, the tech giants might show some flexibility.

Instead, Apple and Google have insisted that rules are rules.

What this underlines is that governments around the world have been forced to frame part of their response to the global pandemic according to rules set down by giant unelected corporations.

At a time when the power of the tech giants is under the microscope as never before, that will leave many people feeling uncomfortable.

Facebook is adding features to users’ main news feed, including letting them limit comment on their public posts to friends or even specific tagged people.

The feature is similar to one rolled out by Twitter last year.

Facebook will also make it easier to revert to “chronological” mode, with the latest posts displayed first.

The company abandoned this model in 2009, although the option remained buried in a menu, in favour of using algorithms to rank the content shown.

But on Wednesday, vice-president Nick Clegg said a lack of transparency and information available to users had led to mistrust.

And so Facebook has moved its “most recent” option to a new “feed filter bar”, at the top of the news feed, which also allows users to prioritise posts from up to 30 friends or particular pages, a feature introduced in October last year, before reverting to algorithmic content ranking.

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Facebook News feature launches in UK
Despite the change, Mr Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister, said Facebook’s algorithmic content ranking – and personalised advertising – continued to offer “so many benefits to society”.

Comparing its use of algorithms to a romantic couple in which ones does the shopping and the other cooks dinner, he said: “Content ranking is a dynamic partnership between people and algorithms.

“Your news feed is shaped heavily by your choices and actions.”

In a further bid for transparency, the news feed’s “Why am I seeing this?” links will now detail the criteria for recommended posts – from people and organisations users do not follow – such as having recently interacted with a similar post.

The new controls would be available for Android app users first, Facebook said, with an iOS update for Apple phones in the coming weeks.

Live-audio app Clubhouse is creating plenty of chatter – about itself.

Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West, Demi Lovato and Mark Zuckerberg are among the celebrities to have popped up on the service. And you can find chats about everything from Bitcoin and Buddhism to relationships and R&B music on it.

Even so, the idea that this one-year-old app could be worth $4bn (£2.9bn) is startling.

It stems from a Bloomberg report saying the San Francisco-based start-up is seeking fresh funds at this level.

But it was only in January that venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz bought a stake valuing the firm at a quarter of the sum.

The jump may be justified by a follow-up report that Twitter has discussed buying the app for the higher price – although it declined to confirm this when asked.

Why would Clubhouse be worth so much?
Clubhouse had about 13.4 million users in late March, according to research firm App Annie, having added about a fifth of that number over the previous four weeks alone.

In short, it’s growing quickly – despite being “invite only” and limited to Apple’s iOS – and appears to have found a gap in the market.

“It’s at the intersection of several hot trends – audio, live and social,” said Joseph Evans from Enders Analysis.

“And it’s recreating some of the things we can’t do normally because of the coronavirus pandemic restrictions, such as attending a talk or having a group conversation.”

At present the app doesn’t make any money. But that’s not necessarily important.

As Sarah Frier’s book No Filter recounts, Mark Zuckerberg insisted Instagram take its time before introducing ads after Facebook bought the photo app in 2012 for a then-groundbreaking $1bn.

The reason, he said, was that it was more important to establish “staying power” first.

But Instagram only achieved its value because both Facebook and Twitter wanted to buy the business.

And that’s unlikely to be the case this time round.

“A few years ago Facebook would probably have already put an offer on the table [for Clubhouse], said Mr Evans.

“But it’s not in the market for another social network because of the competition scrutiny that it’s under, so Facebook’s only option is to compete with it.”

Indeed, Facebook has just launched a new web-based app of its own called Hotline, which lets hosts chat to their audience via audio and text.

What other rivals are out there?
Twitter has already launched Spaces, an audio-streaming feature inside the existing Twitter app.

It is being rolled out to select creators first, but the plan is to allow anyone to create a “space” later this month.

Chat app Telegram launched a voice chat feature last year, and revamped the feature in March to work like Clubhouse’s one-to-many dynamic.

And Discord – a sleeping giant in the voice comms space – has just launched Stages, where one speaker “on stage” can speak to many people at once.

Business-focused giants Slack and LinkedIn are known to be working on the idea too.

Many of these apps have much bigger audiences than Clubhouse ever has had – and are available on more platforms, including Android and PCs.

What other challenges does Clubhouse face?
Content moderation is set to be a big issue.

Clubhouse has already attracted controversy with reports of it being used by far-right personalities to discuss claims of women fabricating rape accusations, as well as instances of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism.

And this isn’t a good time to attract this kind of attention.

Politicians in the US are threatening to remove legal protections given to social networks under a law known as Section 230, after accusing them of bias and allowing harmful material to run rampant.

And in the UK, the proposed Online Safety Bill could soon give regulator Ofcom the power to block apps it judges to have failed to protect users.

Policing live audio is a lot harder than using algorithms to detect offensive text-based comments.

And while Clubhouse does retain audio recordings of chats if an incident is reported to it in “real-time”, it does not do so if a user tries to report a past offence, hindering any follow-up investigation.

Another risk is that Clubhouse might not prove “sticky” enough with its users.

One early adopter says she has found herself using it less and less because there are podcasts and other media available that do a better job of competing for her attention.

“Clubhouse makes it really easy for people to create content, but actually the content itself is surprisingly hard to use,” said Sharon O’Dea, an Amsterdam-based digital communications consultant.

“You can’t share it, you can’t record it, you can’t quote it, and it often takes speakers ages to get to their key point.

“It just feels to me like it’s it doesn’t respect my time as a consumer.”

How might Clubhouse become profitable?
The traditional way for social networks to make money is adverts.

But an audio-only format makes that difficult.

Would users stick around if forced to listen to pre-roll promotions? Would the natural flow of conversations be damaged by hosts having to pause for regular breaks, or worse ads simply playing over parts of discussions, in a similar way to how Twitch interrupts video gameplay?

As an alternative, the app’s creators have suggested they could take a cut of payments made by listeners to room hosts in order to thank them or access premium “ticketed” content.

Patreon, another start-up, has already built a business around this model, and was valued at $4bn in its latest funding round.

Clubhouse has just introduced a money transfer tool of its own – but for now has opted to let 100% of payments go to creators rather than taking a commission.

“Firmware attacks are not common on a day-to-day basis, but that’s because people don’t realise they’re being infected by such an attack,” says Mr Boyd.

“It’s like when ransomware first came onto the scene – people didn’t know of anyone who was infected by it, and if big organisations were, they wouldn’t tell anyone about it, as there was an element of shame, not wanting their clients to know they’d been infected.”

Mr Boyd adds that a new generation of “budding hardware enthusiasts” who have been learning their way around firmware by “modding video game consoles over the last decade” could well pose additional threats to enterprise cyber-security going forward – a point Mt Cirlig fervently agrees with, since he hacked the firmware in his own car when he was younger.

“Microsoft is right to raise this as a major issue, because we need to bring firmware designers and operational technologies along the journey of cyber-security, the way we have with software companies,” says Mr Potter.

“As we connect more things to the internet, we’re connecting a lot more devices that haven’t been designed with cyber-security in mind. And if the trend continues, bad guys will go after it.”

People can now enter their phone numbers into a website to see if they appeared in a recent Facebook data breach.

Details of more than 530 million people were leaked in a database online, largely consisting of mobile numbers.

People can use the Have I Been Pwned online tool to check if their numbers or emails were compromised.

Facebook says the data is from an “old” breach in 2019 but privacy watchdogs are now investigating.

The data
Facebook said it had “found and fixed” the breach more than a year-and-a-half ago.

But the information has now been published for free in a hacking forum, making it widely available.

The database covers 533 million people in 106 countries, according to researchers analysing the data. That includes 11 million Facebook users in the UK, 30 million Americans and 7 million Australians.

Not every piece of data is available for each user but 500 million phone numbers were leaked compared with “only a few million email addresses”, Troy Hunt, a security expert who runs HaveIBeenPwned said in a blog on his website.

‘Not just a tiny slice of people’
Mr Hunt launched the phone number search function after “unprecedented traffic” to the website, following the news of the Facebook data leak.

Previously, users of the platform could only search for email addresses.

Visitors to the website can now enter their mobile number into a search box, and the website will confirm if it has appeared in the leaked database.

“I wanted to ensure Have I Been Pwned could answer that question for everyone, not just a tiny slice of people,” Mr Hunt told the BBC.

It has also been suggested that Facebook’s own chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, had his mobile number leaked in the database.

“This is the number associated with his account from the recent Facebook leak,” security expert Dave Walker tweeted, along with a screenshot of Zuckerberg’s leaked phone number.

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View original tweet on Twitter
The screenshot also suggests Mr Zuckerberg was on messaging platform Signal – which uses end-to-end encryption and is not owned by Facebook.

Facebook has requested users input their phone numbers since 2011, citing security reasons.

It allows for “two-factor authentication”, an additional feature that sends a text to a user’s mobile whenever somebody logs into their account.

The tech giant has advised users to check what details they share publicly on the platform by updating the How People Find and Contact You section, as well as completing “regular privacy checkups”.

Facebook added the data was “scraped” using public information available on the system, rather than hacked.

Meanwhile, several investigations have been launched into Facebook by privacy watchdogs around the world.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it was working with the tech firm to establish if “the dataset referred to is indeed the same as that reported in 2019”.

The Philippines’ National Privacy Commission and Hong Kong’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner have also launched probes into the breach.