The problem with security is that people have to understand before they can be secure. So what happens when Facebook provides better security measures, and yet people fail to use them?
100 million Facebook pages get scraped and hosted on a torrent site.
According to Thinq, the files (scraped by a man named Ron Bowes of Skull Security) contain the personal data includes the given names and URL of each user. Of course someone looking at that information can then glean a wealth of other items such as the ability to click through to that user’s friends, even if those profiles are non-searchable.
The interesting part? None of this is illegal.
Because the information is publicly available, all that Bowes did was wrap it up into a single, neat package. The question that arises, of course, is what will be learned from it. Will this be a case-in-point lesson about security for users, or will Facebook once again come under fire? The fact is, Facebook provided the ability to secure a user’s page…but you can only lead a horse to water.
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