Data Firm Leaks 48 Million User Profiles it Scraped From Facebook, LinkedIn, Others (zdnet.com)

Zack Whittaker, reporting for ZDNet: A little-known data firm was able to build 48 million personal profiles, combining data from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others -- without the users' knowledge or consent. Localblox, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, says it "automatically crawls, discovers, extracts, indexes, maps and augments data in a variety of formats from the web and from exchange networks." Since its founding in 2010, the company has focused its collection on publicly accessible data sources, like social networks Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and real estate site Zillow to name a few, to produce profiles.

But earlier this year, the company left a massive store of profile data on a public but unlisted Amazon S3 storage bucket without a password, allowing anyone to download its contents. The bucket, labeled "lbdumps," contained a file that unpacked to a single file over 1.2 terabytes in size. The file listed 48 million individual records, scraped from public profiles, consolidated, then stitched together.

Comments

Did they sell any to the Republicans?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they sold it to Republicans they need to be dragged before Congress and publicly humiliated, otherwise this is a non-issue.

What a world

[jenningsthecat]

A Canadian kid gets charged with "exploiting a vulnerability", (i.e. incrementing a number in a URL), and faces ten years in prison for archiving the FOI data he collected as a result. He had no idea he was doing anything wrong. (FOI? Hello!). These assclowns scraped data, and created 48 million personal profiles without consent. They knew full well what they were doing. Then they effectively published the data. Careless, much? Arguably they were criminally careless. They probably won't face any penalties at all. Go figure.

Re:"Leaked" public data

[Nidi62]

I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

the company left a massive store of profile data on a public but unlisted Amazon S3 storage bucket

Cue the Congressional hearing with the 80 year old Congressman asking why Amazon even allows companies to store anything in these buckets if they have holes, and why they can't just stop the leaks with duct tape.