Facebook Exposed: Personal Details Of 100 million At Stake?

The privacy of Facebook users was violated when personal details of its 100 million users of were available for download after they were published by an online security agent.

Ron Bowles, who works for Skull Security, used a code to scan Facebook profiles. He then compiled a list of data not hidden by users’ privacy settings. This list is now available as a 2.8 GB downloadable file and contains personal information such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers as well as the URL of every “searchable” Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID. Within an hour of its release, the list had reportedly been distributed and downloaded by more than 1000 users.Ron said he wanted to expose the frailties in Facebook’s privacy settings.

But Facebook vehemently denied any breach of its privacy security. It claimed that this information was already available online and no private data has been compromised. It further added that this information is already available on Facebook Online directory so as to aid users in finding their friends.

However the fact remains that Privacy is a huge concern for thousands of Facebook users and earlier this year there was a storm of protest over the complexity of its privacy settings. This impelled the social networking site to simplify the controls that let users set how much of their personal information is visible to other users. In the process, many security analyst fear, Facebook may have compromised on its privacy security settings.

A tricky situation for the users

Only last week, the social networking giant registered 500 million users and this means that the file contains information for every 1 out of 5 Facebook users. Now the users find themselves in a predicament: if they remove themselves from the Facebook online directory, they may not be found by new people on the site and if they choose to leave the setting unchanged then their private information might not be private anymore. What would you choose?

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