If you have a Facebook page and you have never paid too much attention to the "privacy settings" of your page you might be interested to know that your information might now be available to the public as Mr. Ron Bowes of Skull Security appears to have quite legally used a cleverly crafted web crawler code to gather details on over 100 million users who either intentionally or unintentionally failed to obscure their profiles from search engines .
Mr. Bowes has published his archive of data to the web containing names, profile URL, and unique user ID of all 100 million users, scraped from the popular social networking site, which currently claims a user base of over 500M users.
Simon Davies from the watchdog Privacy International, though, calls the data mining an "attack" and comments, "Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it... It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence... People did not understand the privacy settings and this is the result."
No comments:
Post a Comment