Data for 100m Facebook accounts published to BitTorrent

[Peaches]

Data for 100m Facebook accounts published to BitTorrent

Forever is a mighty long time

By Dan Goodin •

Underscoring the permanence of data published on the internet, a security researcher has compiled the names and URLs of more than 100 million Facebook users and made them available as a BitTorrent download.

Ron Bowles, who describes himself as a certified penetration tester, said he used some hastily written code to harvest the names of more than 100 million users who had set their accounts to be accessible to Google and other search engines. The list also includes the unique web address to each account, meaning the pages will be accessible even if the users later configure their accounts to be private.

“Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details,” Bowles wrote in a blog post. “If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops ”

Story - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/facebook_user_data_published/