FTA: "Accessing a user's page from the list will also enable you to click through to friends' profiles - even if those friends have made themselves non-searchable."
I see your point about it not being a "leak" exactly, but I think there's something to be said for it exposing how ineffective Facebook's privacy controls are. Then again, anyone who expects to prevent something from being public information after telling it to all their friends isn't thinking things through.
This is just an archive of URLs and names. It's pretty useless data. It saves you from crawling Facebook's names directory but to actually get any data about users you'll need to crawl 100 million+ pages. This data is hardly worth putting a torrent up for.
About as invasive as the visualization of the connectedness of Americans on FB was[1]. And FB made a super-huge deal out of that. I'm curious to see how this goes down.
How is this a privacy threat? All the information in the torrent is totally public, and existed for everyone to see on the internet before this .torrent file was created. Google's cache certainly has copies of all the data too.
What does running for office have to do with this? If you put some sort of compromising information on to the internet, that was probably a bad idea. If that's the case, then you have nobody to blame for your failed political career but yourself. But this .torrent file is just another copy of that information...there are probably another 10-20 other, unique copies out there.
Edit: also, it's not like this torrent makes any of the data easier to access...it's actually probably much easier to just go to someone's facebook page and look at it than it is to download multiple gigabytes of data, most of which will be useless.
[+] [-] byrneseyeview|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Natsu|15 years ago|reply
I see your point about it not being a "leak" exactly, but I think there's something to be said for it exposing how ineffective Facebook's privacy controls are. Then again, anyone who expects to prevent something from being public information after telling it to all their friends isn't thinking things through.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] quellhorst|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avar|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] coderdude|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coderdude|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnash|15 years ago|reply
Oh you mean like the public directory that is already available on facebook that you've linked to in your article? Give me a break.
[+] [-] Groxx|15 years ago|reply
[1]: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-s...
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] oasisbob|15 years ago|reply
Running for a political office in the next 20 years? Do you know the state of your Facebook profile when this archive was created?
[+] [-] cryptoz|15 years ago|reply
What does running for office have to do with this? If you put some sort of compromising information on to the internet, that was probably a bad idea. If that's the case, then you have nobody to blame for your failed political career but yourself. But this .torrent file is just another copy of that information...there are probably another 10-20 other, unique copies out there.
Edit: also, it's not like this torrent makes any of the data easier to access...it's actually probably much easier to just go to someone's facebook page and look at it than it is to download multiple gigabytes of data, most of which will be useless.
[+] [-] joeyh|15 years ago|reply