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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.
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.
I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
guess i should stop spewing personal information all over the internet
maybe then smacktards wont be able to make me into a profile other smacktards will leave in a public s3 bucket
Where's the benefit of locking down this user data? It seems like, if we want to harm scammy companies like this, removing their profit motive by publishing all the (non-copyrighted) data makes sense.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Hey, America: Do you see now what it is you've done to yourselves? Are you utterly thrilled that your lives have been splayed open like a frog in a dissection tray, and sold to the highest bidder? Does it give you a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that you traded away your privacy for 'FREE' access to shitty 'social media', so you can attention-whore to your hearts' content, and have 'freinds' that you'll never meet and who don't really give a fuck about you? ARE YOU HAPPY, AMERICA?
..and now, you'll expect The Government to come in and FIX YOUR FUCK-UPS.
You poor, dumb, SHITS.
We should tell them to turn a blind eye to the whole thing. "Call it evolution in action".
I mean, personally, what would you as a typical slashdotter do with this data if you weren't too busy cleaning the I.T. closets?
See who can build the most efficient script to "find Waldo"?
Someone had to do it.
Does gathering and organizing publicly available data create intellectual property?
I'm gonna say yes based on this model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid
To create the higher level by scrapping from the lower level is to create leakable intellectual property.
If they sold it to Republicans they need to be dragged before Congress and publicly humiliated, otherwise this is a non-issue.
Here is their publicly available personal info.
http://www.localblox.com/
George Fink - CEO/Marketer/Scumbag: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ge...
Sabira Arefin - Founder/Entrepreneur(lol)/Scumbag: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sa...
Colby Atwood - President/Marketer/Scumbag: https://www.linkedin.com/in/co...
Ashfaq Rahman - Chief Data Scientist/Scumbag: https://www.linkedin.com/in/as...
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,
That is data people posted publicly.
Now if they did that with FB's "shadow profiles" of non-users, then maybe I can see a cause for being upset. But if people spew their private data to every advert company on the internet, inc the biggest data aggregators out there like FB, G and Linkedin, they do not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy". That's like publishing your drunken fratboy antics in the New York Times, and then being upset when someone reads about them.
People have to start thinking about what they are doing with their data. Anything else is a tapdance around the problem, and won't solve it.
So, Zuckerberg.... repeat again that you don't sell data..
The court found that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
hmmmm, wait a second... *sniffs the smoke* *listens to the chanting mob* *Looks down at the pitchfork in his hands*. Yep. This is a witch-hunt.
Now, don't get me wrong. I honestly despise this paticular brand of witch. These guys suck and their actions have a very anti-social bent to it. Their buisness model is abuse and intrusive. Fuck marketers. I know plenty well enough to protect myself, but "the masses" are just kinda generally dumb and enough are swayable into doing dumb things. Like using emacs or voting along party lines. Or worse. There are large scale sociological problems when corporations know too much about every individual.
BUT. I mean, come on guys. We'v got to be allowed to build our own phone books. A name and an address isn't.... Nobody expects that to be private. If you own a house it's literally public knowledge. You WANT people to know you own that land. This is all publicly accessible data. That's fine. In fact I'd expect companies to collect this stuff. It's not a problem. The problem is if they harvest PRIVATE data.
So... like... let's go burn down the castle of someone that's actually a monster.
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.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Wait, so a company that scraped data from public sources, left the data unsecured, and the public could access it?
personal profiles...from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others - -- without the users' knowledge or consent.
Are you telling me that users of social networks do not know that the public part of their profile is available publicly? What? Hey, there's plenty of privacy violations going around, but this isn't one of them. Save your outrage for any one of the many other examples.
Order your own LexisNexis "Full File" - you will be shocked at the data this private company has collected on you. No shoe size (yet.) https://personalreports.lexisn... Also order your own LexisNexis "C.L.U.E. Auto Report" and "C.L.U.E. Personal Property Report" https://personalreports.lexisn... By Federal law, they are required to provide you with free reports once per year.
Was there a time when Amazon shipped S3 buckets public by default, with permissions wide open to the world? What is it with these S3 buckets.
Last time I set up a public bucket (to share some of my photos to some friends), I had to explicitly set the checkbox, and it came up with "you can't just walk into Mordor" warning.
... they scraped public data, and the problem is that they carelessly left it ... public?
Anyone got a link?
The general public is barely aware of 1, 2 or 3 companies that have collected and used information from public and private sources because of the left wing faux outrage that Trump was involved with 1 of them.
What are they going to say when they find out its also LinkedIn and Twitter and every other 'free' service and more collecting/scraping/surveying/using/sharing/selling every shred of collected information to sell more advertising and or create relationships for their own purposes.
This was so easy to predict a long long time ago (hence many people have avoided these 'services' since day 1).
So I linked 4 scumbags to a scumbag site (linkedin) who scumbagged everyone's personal data while circumcising privacy!