Over 100 million users’ data scraped from Facebook

One of the most important things to learn when you go online is that not every face that seems friendly hides a friendly individual. Millions of Facebook users learned this the hard way: over 100 million accounts’ contents were scraped from the most popular social network and published on the internet.

No, this data is not stolen from Facebook, the social network’s databases were not hacked and servers were not accessed in any unauthorized manner. The personal details that were published were exposed by the users themselves.

A security consultant at the company called Skull Security, Ron Bowes, wrote a program that scanned all the data in Facebook’s public access directory and saved the results in a text file. The data that he collected this way included personal details of the users, including birthdays, phone numbers, addresses and phone numbers.

This information is publicly available to all the search engines and white pages services, and to everyone who wants to have it. All he has done, as he told in an interview, was to collect this information and put it in a nicer format – all this for statistical analysis.

These details are available to the public unless the user chooses to make it accessible to their online friends only.

The data compiled by Bowes has been downloaded by many internet users, some of them probably with criminal intent, as the data thus collected can be used for identity theft, credit card scams and other such activities.

The moral of the story is that you should always check for the availability of your personal data when trusting a service like Facebook with it.