Facebook recently disclosed that a system glitch resulted in the exposure of sensitive personal data from as many as six million users. The impact from this particular breach seems relatively inconsequential, but it’s a sign of a larger problem when it comes to protecting personal data on the Web.

Let’s start with a little about the incident itself. The Facebook data breach is related to the Download Your Information feature. When someone downloads their Facebook contact data, the glitch exposed email addresses and personal phone numbers for contacts even if that data was not visible on Facebook itself.

Facebook resolved the issue within 24 hours of being notified, and publicly disclosed the incident on its blog last Friday. There was a delay between the incident response and disclosure to give Facebook time to inform regulators and affected customers of the breach.

Six million is a big number in some contexts; but to be fair to Facebook, it represents only one half of one percent of the 1.1 billion Facebook users. When you consider how big the breach could have been, or the recent revelations alleging that the NSA has access to virtually all data from everywhere, the Facebook breach almost seems trivial.

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