Details of Millions of Facebook Users Published

(News Today) - The privacy of millions of Facebook users has been jeopardised after some of their details were harvested and published on the internet.

An online security consultant who wished to highlight the social networking site's privacy issues published a list of data taken from more than 100million users' profiles.

Ron Bowles used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user's privacy settings.

The list has been shared as a downloadable file which has now spread rapidly across the internet, prompting anger and concern from millions of users around the world.

The file has now spread rapidly across the net prompting anger and concern from millions of users all over the world.

On Pirate Bay, the world's biggest file-sharing website, the list was being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users, but it is believed it will be acessed by thousands more in a matter of days.

One Pirate Bay user, going by the name of lusifer69, described the list as 'awesome and a little terrifying'.

But Facebook said that the information was already freely available online.

In response to the latest privacy invasion they said: 'People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want.

'In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook.

'No private data is available or has been compromised.'

Simon Davies, from the watchdog Privacy International, told BBC news that Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen.

He said: 'Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it.

'It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence.

'It adds to the confusion which has long surrounded the privacy settings - people don't fully understand them and this is the result,' he said.

Facebook, which now has 500 million users, hit the headlines earlier this year when they changed their privacy settings without consulting users.

There was a storm of protest over the complexity of the privacy settings and the fact that private and personal information was readily available to anyone.

As a result, the site introduced simplified privacy controls.

Facebook has a default setting for privacy that makes some user information publicly available.

People have to make a conscious choice to opt-out of the defaults.

A spokesman for the firm said: 'It is similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook.

'If someone does not want to be found, we also offer a number of controls to enable people not to appear in search on Facebook, in search engines, or share any information with applications.

But Mr Davies disagreed, saying the default settings should be changed.

'This highlights the argument for a higher level of privacy and proves the case for default nondisclosure,' he said.

'There are going to be a lot of angry and concerned people right now who will be wondering who has their data and what they should do.'

Mr Davies pointed out that more personal information, such as email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses, had not been included in the trawl.

Source : kompas

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