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Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Facebook Users Listed On Bit Torrent

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with me? Leave me your opinion.

The data of 100 million Facebook
users was emptied on the file
sharing service Bit Torrent.

Ron Bowes, Canadian security researcher,
wanted to help with the testing of login
attacks.

Bowes wanted to help other researchers, and
he put the information on Bit Torrent. It
was downloaded several hundred times, and
made its way to Pirate Bay.

Bowes pulled account names, URLs and contact
details. The names of those users' friends,
even if they were not listed in search engine
results.

"As I thought more about it, and talked to other
people, I realized that this is a scary privacy
issue," per Bowes blog post. "I can find the name
of pretty much every person on Facebook." Facebook
helpfully informs you that "anyone can opt out of
appearing here by changing their Search privacy
settings," but that doesn't help much anymore
considering I already have them all and you will
too, when you download the torrent. Suckers!" His
post continued.

"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," Facebook's
statement. "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. 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."

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20100729071824writ.nb/topstory.html

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