In more news... an online security consultant (Ron Bowes) took the public information available from Facebook, put it into one file, and posted it on Pirate Bay. This has caused some 'terifying' responses from facebook users.
Do I think that facebook users' info has been compromised? No, I don't. Nothing criminal happened. Furthermore, if you think about it, he just "republished" the info. It's already available online on facebook!!!! All he did was put it into one massive file.
Bowes claims it's "a scary privacy issue". However, I disagree. All that information is voluntary put up there by users. The users themselves are to determine what's private or not. All the info that Bowes grabbed was "public", therefore, not a privacy issue.
And guess what..? I agree with Facebook's response:
"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. Our responsibility is to respect their wishes. In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher. This information already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook. No private data is available or has been compromised. Similar to a phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook. If someone does not want to be found, we also offer a number of controls to enable people not to appear in search on Facebook, in search engines, or share any information with applications."
~Matt
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