100 million Facebook pages

"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.

Bowes' directory contains 171 million entries, relating to more than 100 million individual users - more than one in five of Facebook's recently trumpeted half billion user base."


Gizmodo and thinQ have both posted stories about FB pages being torrented and who is downloading them.

"Reader Clint discovered that all you had to do is use something like Peer Block, which grabs the IPs of the other users also downloading the torrent and identifies which company or university or organization they belong to. You can check this yourself by hopping on the torrent and doing the same thing."

Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent*Link


well..

I just checked this out..



I dont care for FB..
I dont have 1, LPF is about the closest ill have. but i know some of you here do have one. so i thought i would bring it up.
oke:

Honestly the first thing i thought was..
All those companies have been identified as torrent users? LoL!!
:evil: :crackup:

I saw this on gizmodo, I thought the 1mil were all closed accounts because when you "delete" your facebook it still stores your info?

I used to have a FB a while ago and then deleted it. I downloaded that file to see if I was in it.

DiRollin said:

I used to have a FB a while ago and then deleted it. I downloaded that file to see if I was in it.

Click to expand...

Find me so i can sue them for big money and buy everyone on the forum a spartan. :shhh:

I have a FB profile and it's set to maximum possible privacy, but I still wouldn't post anything on it that I didn't want to potentially become public, just common sense that social sites are inherently insecure. Not too worried if people do manage to download my profile, cause as I said there's nothing there that I would really care if it got out.

I'm not in there because I can't be found on public listings. Friends of mine are though

rangedunits said:

Find me so i can sue them for big money and buy everyone on the forum a spartan. :shhh:

Click to expand...

epic lulz

I don't understand what the big deal is. Is it some sort of security issue?

I thought that the whole point of "Social networking sites" was to make your information "public" so you can keep in touch with old friends, make new ones, and whatever else people use these things for.
If everyone's profile is private, doesn't that defeat the purpose?