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100 Million Facebook Pages Leaked On Torrent Site
Stoobalou writes "A directory containing personal details about more than 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on an Internet file-sharing site. The 2.8GB torrent was compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security, who created a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook's open access directory, which lists all users who haven't bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines."
I'm bringing it on to a 1 Gbit, 10 TB/month seedbox...
Enjoy.
Same here; I killed my Facebook account 3 years ago, but who knows how long these guys have been aggregating their data, or who else might have been posting information about me.
Palm trees and 8
Well if Facebook's TOS includes them housing your profile data, does compiling publicly visible information into a torrent, shared and owned by everyone, breach their TOS?
Do Facebook even have any claims to that data, if it is publicly visible in the first place?
and get more information from those people. You stay classy slashdot.
I'm not crazy about making a second reply to this one post but I wanted this to be said.
I have some disagreement with this being modded -1 Flamebait. I don't think his intention was to start a flamewar, though I admit that's possible and an AC has already responded that way. Still, this is a genuinely held sentiment. A lot of people really do feel this way. It's as though they think that not talking about this problem and not making such information available will make it go away. That amounts to burying one's head in the sand.
I'd rather call it out and explain why this is false and shortsighted than bury the comment under negative moderations. Making the comment disappear for all users who are not browsing at -1 will surely reduce the audience of that one comment. What it won't do is persuade others who mistakenly feel the same way. So I don't think this is Flamebait. I think this is a false perception that can be corrected with a true perception.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
and get more information from those people. You stay classy slashdot.
Rest assured that the blackhats who want this information already know about it.
I agree - and while it's good that more people know about this so they can protect themselves, it wasn't the case that every black hat knew about this already - there'll be a load of script kiddies giving it a go now, so the chances of getting hacked went up.
That said, the people who had a genuine malicious intent were more than likely doing this behind the scenes, while the 'kiddies' tend to go for vandalism and defacement. I'd rather that if I got hacked, it just said 'ask me about teh spam' on my wall, than it silently installed a data-tracking app or something...
But really, what's the issue here? That someone went to the trouble of scraping every public name and profile off the site, or that it wasn't Google?
Mark
PS Why doesn't Chrome recognise Google as a properly spelled word?
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zomg... somebody also already made a searchable version of the data...
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afacebook.com
How is it a leak if all of these pages are available publicly anyway?
What about those of us who CHOOSE to make their profile completely public and full of information about themselves?
The problem is that's not true. It is becoming increasingly easy to correlate all the information others have incidentally posted about you, and put together a pretty good picture of you, even if you personally have posted nothing at all.
I have no facebook account. Yet yesterday I got an email facebook invite from somebody I've never heard of, and it said "here are 9 other friends of this person you may know." I *do* know 7 of the 9, through different business dealings that have nothing to do with each other. They're sure not people who "friended" me, since we don't have that kind of relationship. It's creepy.
At a certain point the government will discover they have a 'compelling interest' to confiscate and retain the entire Facebook database. At that point, we're all fucked.
You're probably thinking of cracking. Hacking, in the sense "creative programming", may have been part of it.