ABC reported, that an internet security consultant has collected and published limited personal data on about 100 million Facebook users to show his concerns about Facebook’s privacy settings. Ron Bowles wrote a script which was looking for profile information from users who had not manually opted to hide their profile settings. Then he posted all the gathered data as a downloadable torrent to PirateBay.com. On the world’s biggest file-sharing website, the list was downloaded by more than 1,000 users.
Simon Davies of Privacy International told the BBC that Facebook should have seen this coming: “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” said Davies. “People did not understand the privacy settings and this is the result,” he added.
In a statement Facebook said that the information was already freely available online, and “people who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want”. In this case, the statement said, “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”.