Data off of Facebook is now accessible to anyone with the Facebook torrent which was created by a hacker with a lot of free time. Rob Bowes is the person who decided it would be fun to put time into making a web crawling code to steal info off Facebook from 171 million users. Bowes put the 2.8 GB file online as a torrent. Facebook made their remark on the issue saying all the details is what can be found with a search engine and doesn’t matter all that much. But others say the Facebook torrent is one more indictment of Facebook privacy policy, and users should be concerned.
171 million Facebook users hurt
The Facebook torrent contains names, profile URLs and unique user IDs for 171 million Facebook members. Daily Tech reports that Bowes, who heads a company called Skull Security, posted the Facebook torrent on Pirate Bay. As of the morning of July 28, the Facebook torrent had about 13,000 active downloads on Pirate Bay. The data that Bowes scraped and packaged contains information Facebook users have either chosen to share or neglected to protect. Anyone who worked out their privacy settings to say only friends could see their information aren’t in this torrent that Bowes created.
Facebook having a hard time with privacy
The Facebook torrent comes at a bad time when Facebook is already suffering the losses from their change on privacy settings to allow commercial use. The details that Facebook users “agreed to make public” are the things gathered up by researches to make this privacy change, reports BBC News quoting Facebook. Tech Crunch suggests that users choose soon to change their privacy settings to “friends only.” You aren’t going to be happy when people put all of your information into a package and let it loose for many who want it just because you set your settings to “everyone”.
Facebook torrent will remain forever
The Facebook torrent info is accessible to anybody who uses the search engines Google, Bing or Facebooksearch. But Future of the Internet makes the point that the Facebook torrent is a snapshot of Facebook’s directory that lasts forever. In case you are in it, you’ll never have that details deleted, even if you make an effort to delete you account totally or change your privacy settings to something else.
Friends of users hurt by Facebook torrent
In addition to the personal data for one fifth of all Facebook users, the Facebook torrent contains the programs Bowes used to mine the data. Bowes said he wants to try and get everybody on Facebook soon, reports Tech Crunch. Users are quitting when hoping Facebook will switch privacy settings to be friends only by default-
Go to Account and Privacy Settings and Applications, Games, and Websites (link near the bottom, in a box) and Public Search and (Uncheck box).
Additional reading
Daily Tech
dailytech.com/Info+on+100M+Facebook+Users+Harvested+and+Posted+in+Torrent++Legally/article19198.htm
Tech Crunch
techcrunch.com/2010/07/28/hacker-proves-facebooks-public-data-is-public/
Future of the Internet
futureoftheinternet.org/facebooks-ocean-of-names-becomes-a-torrent
