A fifth of Facebook user names “leaked” to file-sharers

The latest privacy furore regarding Facebook – there’s always something going down in that department – involves a huge list of user names being put up on BitTorrent.

The Guardian reports that Canadian security expert Ron Bowes downloaded the near-3GB worth of data as part of a project he was working on.

In actual fact, the information is legitimately available to anyone, as it’s public domain and can be found on any search engine, if a Facebook user hasn’t chosen to hide their profile from search results.

It’s just that this sort of data isn’t normally seen in this sort of quantity. What Bowes did was to create a script to harvest this information, and having grabbed the publicly available details of 100 million Facebook users, he put them up on a file-sharing site.

While the only details included are the user’s account URL, ID, name and a sample of the user’s friends, it’s still a slightly worrying development.

The Guardian states that Bowes initial interest was to determine the most popular user names on Facebook, which he did. And that information could potentially be used by hacking software which targets those most common names.

Mr Bowes told the BBC that he published the data to highlight privacy issues. Facebook’s response was also highlighted by the BBC, with the site commenting: “In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook. No private data is available or has been compromised.”

Apparently the list has been downloaded by hundreds of people thus far, although you can expect that number to multiply considerably over the next few days.

Story link: A fifth of Facebook user names “leaked” to file-sharers