100 Million Facebook Profiles Hit the Torrents
And corporations are interested in all your public Facebook data.
Earlier this week, roughly 100 million Facebook accounts were bundled together in a 2.8GB package and put on the torrents for anyone to download. Mind you, the information contained in the package was just a result of a programmed spider crawling on open Facebook profiles mining anything that was public information.
Clint, a Gizmodo reader, used Peer Block to checked out who else was downloading the torrent file and matched the IP addresses to corporations. Turns out that businesses (or at least those who are working for those business and using BitTorrent at work) are quite interested in the information of 100 million Facebook users.
The list includes:
A.C. Nielsen
Agilent Technologies
Apple
AT&T - Possible Macrovision
Baker & McKenzie
BBC
Bertelsmann Media
Boeing
Church of Scientology
Cisco Systems
Cox Enterprises
Davis Polk & Wardwell
Deutsche Telekom
Disney
Duracell
Ernst & Young
Fujitsu
Goldman Sachs
Halliburton
HBO & Company
Hilton Hospitality
Hitachi
HP
IBM
Intel
Intuit
Levi Strauss & Co.
Lockheed-Martin Corp
Lucasfilm
Lucent
Lucent Technologies
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co
Mcafee
MetLife
Mitsubishi
Motorola
Northrop Grumman
Novell
Nvidia
O'Melveny & Myers
Oracle Corp
Pepsi Cola
Procter and Gamble
Random House
Raytheon
Road Runner RRWE
Seagate
Sega
Siemens AG
SONY CORPORATION
Sprint
Sun Microsystems
Symantec
The Hague
Time Warner Telecom
Turner Broadcasting system
Ubisoft Entertainment
Unisys
United Nations
Univision
USPS
Viacom
Vodafone
Wells Fargo
Xerox PARC
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Now the only thing on the news for the next 2 weeks will be fools moaning to reporters about Facebook privacy and how they were too dumb to change privacy settings.
The big eye, always watching.....WATCHING!!!!!!
creepers
Glad my privacy is cranked up then.
WOW!
lol
If your profile is public you deserve to get your information mined.
I got the list and compared it to a .csv export of my friends list. I'm proud to say that not one of my friends showed up on the list.
/scripted it in vb.net
this is bullshit news. liars learn and make news. 2.8gb packages has only first name and last name nothing else. it is just name database. 100 million bundles together bullshit. who cares about just a name file.
It wasn't just a name list. There was also a 10 GB file with all the URL's to their accounts. Sense you know their privacy settings are set low, you can use to URL's to mine their data.
Another reason that I am not on Facebook.
No Microsoft and ATi?
Wait, does that mean that, unlike Apple and Nvidia, they actually make good products instead of spending all their time on marketing?
The lack of privacy anywhere scares me. Whether it be online or in the streets, and some times in my very own home.
Privacy is a RIGHT, damned marketing groups (and a few select abusive local police) should learn that already.
I see Apple, but no Microsoft.
"used Peer Block to checked out who"
I see Apple, but no Microsoft.
Microsoft uses windows =D
I downloaded it, too, just to see if I was in it but the sheer size of those text files is huge. And that's all it really is. Text Files. I haven't looked at all of them but I think one text file is full of URLs to non-private profiles. So this isn't anything really major, just something the media can have fun with spinning it into a story.
Privacy is a RIGHT, damned marketing groups (and a few select abusive local police) should learn that already.
Yes, privacy is a right, but you forfeit that right when you allow anyone with an internet connection to view your profile.
It's not illegal since they didn't obtain the information illegally. Like others have said, if you have a public profile, you deserve this.
I'm glad I stopped using Facecrack then.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20 [...] tdebacleqa
Accord to the Yahoo story about this, it was actually 171 Million users.
Good luck with my private info I could care less. My credit score is below 600, I have a paid off 2004 model truck, rent a house, everything else I own was paid for with cash. I have no credit cards,a good paying job,my taxes are paid up, two kids, a registered Republican and I have a married girlfriend. What else you want to know. Who gives a shi*. Dumb A** media will run with anything.
Raytheon? That's not a good thing, they are a major DOD contractor and do work for the NSA.
Good luck with my private info I could care less. My credit score is below 600, I have a paid off 2004 model truck, rent a house, everything else I own was paid for with cash. I have no credit cards,a good paying job,my taxes are paid up, two kids, a registered Republican and I have a married girlfriend. What else you want to know. Who gives a shi*. Dumb A** media will run with anything.
So you are a 100% douchebag? Good to know. I hope her husband trolls your account and finds your dumb ass.
i am begining to wonder how much longer it is really going to take for the majority of people who use the internet with their "REAL" personal information to realize that "nothing" on "any" www. website has the slightest chance of being private. only a small amount of peer pressure is all that it takes for most of the population to completely expose themselves on these child-like social pages/networks. i feel sorry for those who don't have the sense to say "no thanks" to these web sites.
This could not be more overblown and less relevant to anything. Has anyone ever visited the whitepages site, or ussearch, peoplefinder, etc... There are a ton of sites out there that serve no purpose other then collecting and releasing private information on individuals - facebook mining is pretty irrelevant in comparison.
I used to work at chicago title, part of the job was running background checks on the ppl before we issued policy's. Everyone saying that they are safe from such things because they don't use social networking - think again. I could pull up way more information than I care to list here on any random amish dude who has never touched a PC in their lives. Birth records, property records, tax records, criminal records, credit records, job history, travel records, who your relatives are, this is all public information that anyone can obtain if they really want to - no SS needed either - all a SS would do is turn a 99.99% chance that your looking up the right person to 100%. If your seriously worried about privacy regarding anything posted on a site like facebook, wake up - there is a ton more information already out there that is way more private then anything you would post on such a site - and it's not going anywhere.
Not surprised AT ALL.
Interesting that Apple, Intel, and Nvidia are up there while Microsoft and AMD/ATI aren't (yet).
lol, my name was in the files
lol, my name was in the files
Yeah, my name was there too.... good thing I quite Facebork long ago.
So dunno how big a deal it is if just your name appears in that list.
Not surprised AT ALL.Interesting that Apple, Intel, and Nvidia are up there while Microsoft and AMD/ATI aren't (yet).
or the only company who do not allow torrents.
+ for the Microsoft and AMD
That's the scariest one on the list.
Here's my question: When was this data compiled? Some folks may have had their profiles public when the scan was done, and now have them private.
This is exactly the reason I deleted my account...
So, has anyone figured out a way to read the files, because they are a few hundred megabytes, and one is 10 gigabytes, so Notepad & OpenOffice bork on the text files?