Facebook User's Privacy Information Now Disclosed

Pulse

oi-Denise Baptiste

By Denise Baptiste

Friday, July 30, 2010, 13:41

The most famous social net working site, “Facebook" has personal details of 100 million users which have been collected and published on the Internet by a security consultant. Ron Bowles has compiled a list , who used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles and collected the data that was not hidden by the user's privacy settings. The file that was downloaded has a URL of every search able Facebook user's profile , their name and unique ID. Bowles had published this data to highlight the privacy issues of the users. This has spread widely across the net like wild fire and more than 1,000 users have said to have downloaded the list and distributed it too, but the list was already freely available online through a facebook statement. As per the statement, it said that 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 cases like this , the information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing ,other search engines and even on facebook. The statement thus concluded that , “ No private data is available or has been compromised."
As per earlier reports , it was said by Simon Davies from Watchdog Privacy International that Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen and that it should have taken measures 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." he stated.

He also added that the trawl of data fed into "the confusion of the privacy settings", and that the default settings should be changed for the betterment of the site and the users. “ This highlights the argument for a higher level of privacy and proves the case for default nondisclosure. “ he quoted.

Coming to the privacy of the users , there are not going to be happy with it and this will definitely end up in great chaos, he further concluded by saying that, “ There are going to be a lot of angry and concerned people right now who be wondering who has their data and what they should do."