One hundred million Facebook user profiles containing personal information such as Facebook user’s profile details are now available for download. Ron Bowes of Skull Security compiled the 2.8GB torrent (which is currently available on The Pirate Bay) by creating a web crawler to harvest the data of users listed on Facebook’s open access directory.
Security researcher Ron Bowes wrote a Ruby script (a type of programing language) that downloads information from Facebook’s user directory, a searchable index of public profile pages.
The Pirate Bay lists 2923 seeds and 9473 leechers for the torrent file at the time of this writing. Seeds are people who have downloaded the entire file and are uploading to others. Leechers are actively downloading the file.
The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name, unique ID, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Viewing an individual’s profile supposedly gives access to their friends’ pages too – even those who have made themselves non-searchable.
Privacy is a huge concern for many Facebook users, and has put the social networking site in the headlines over and over again. Since all the information is publicly available, Bowes hasn’t violated any laws. It highlights, however, the importance of keeping an eye on your social networking privacy settings and understanding how your personal information is used. Many users might not realize that their names and photos are accessible in Facebook’s public user directory.
are you one of them who are comfortable with having their information included in the torrent file?
Suggested Reading – BBC.co.uk