There had been chatter for years that LG would quit the smartphone business.

It was once the world's third-bestselling mobile brand. These days the loss-making business doesn't even make the global smartphone top 10 list. Market research firm IDC places it 11th.

But its decision to finally give up marks a significant moment.

Not only because it might be the catalyst for other struggling companies, such as Sony, to make the same decision.

But also because LG had distinguished itself by trying to offer something different to the rest of the market.

It was only in January that it teased what had been intended to be its next innovation: a handset whose screen would have expanded in size by rolling out more of its flexible display when required.

"LG failed to hit the sweet spot for consumers despite providing short bursts of excitement with brilliant technology - some of its high-end products were cool but just too niche," Natalya Paul, digital editor of Stuff magazine, told the BBC.

"And as for its more mainstream smartphones, they just didn't do things as well as the competition."

The shame of the matter is that this should have been an opportune moment for LG.

Samsung's latest Galaxy S21 represents a fairly conservative update to its predecessor.

And Huawei - which was briefly the world's bestselling Android phone-maker - looks like it could also be on the way out after the US blocked its access to the processor chips it needs.

But a number of other Chinese brands, including Xiaomi, Vivo and OnePlus, are prospering with advanced models priced at levels LG simply can't profitably compete with.

"LG's decision to abandon mobile phones reflects the unrelenting competitive pressure it has faced in recent years," Ben Wood from CCS Insight commented.

"Other sub-scale phone makers will now wonder how long they can remain in such an over-saturated market."

The following are some of LG's most notable phones over the years:

A data leak involving personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users is being reviewed by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC).

The database is believed to contain a mix of Facebook profile names, phone numbers, locations and other facts about more than 530 million people.

Facebook says the data is "old", from a previously-reported leak in 2019.

But the Irish DPC said it will work with Facebook, to make sure that is the case.

Ireland's regulator is critical to such investigations, as Facebook's European headquarters is in Dublin, making it an important regulator for the EU.

The most recent data dump appears to contain the entire compromised database from the previous leak, which Facebook said it found and fixed more than a year and a half ago.

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

It covers 533 million people in 106 countries, according to researchers who have viewed the data. That includes 11 million Facebook users in the UK and more than 30 million Americans.

Not every piece of data is available for every user, but the large scale of the leak has prompted concern from cyber-security experts.

Facebook sued for 'losing control' of users’ data
WhatsApp to limit service to all who reject terms
Zuckerberg pledges 'privacy-focused' Facebook
The DPC's deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said the recent data dump "appears to be" from the previous leak - and that the data-scraping behind it had happened before the EU's GDPR privacy legislation was in effect.

"However, following this weekend's media reporting we are examining the matter to establish whether the dataset referred to is indeed the same as that reported in 2019," he added.

Phone issues
Despite the claims of the data being "old", some security researchers remain concerned due to the unchanging nature of the data involved.

Phone numbers, for example, are unlikely to have changed for many people in the past two to three years, and other information - such as a date of birth or hometown - never change.

Alon Gal, a well-known personality in cyber-security circles who tweets as @UnderTheBreach, wrote that the phone number database first appeared in January, where hackers could look up the phone database for a small fee.

But the widespread leak of the database "means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked," he tweeted.

"I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data," he added.

This is a cautionary tale on a colossal scale.

It's actually terrifyingly common for companies to store customer data in large, unsecured databases.

Often they are discovered by well-meaning security researchers and are either deleted or made safe swiftly before the bad guys stumble upon the treasure trove.

However, sometimes it's too late.

This case highlights that a company's defence "we've fixed it now" is not good enough.

The horse had bolted long before the stable doors were closed. And clearly, the horse has been having a field day for years since.

The database has likely changed criminal hands many times before now being offered for free.

Facebook may claim this is "an old story", but clearly it's one that keeps coming back to bite it - and, more importantly, its users.

Presentational grey line
Troy Hunt, a security expert who runs HaveIBeenPwned - an online service for users to check if their information has been involved in a data breach - said queries were six times higher than normal since news of the database's release broke.

He also suggested that the leaked dataset could be very useful "for a targeted attack where you know someone's name and country" - though it would be much harder to use for a blanket mass cyber-attack.

"But for spam based on using phone number alone, it's gold," he added.

"Not just SMS, there are heaps of services that just require a phone number these days and now there's hundreds of millions of them conveniently categorised by country with nice mail merge fields like name and gender."