[h84ru3a]

This author sounds a little naive re: technology.

Perhaps he should examine some of the Facebook publicly available scans that have been done by "academic researchers", e.g., in South Korea. It is not rocket science to crawl Facebook.

Facebook's data is accessible. As is any website's back-end database. You are kidding yourself if like the author you think you can put something like Facebook on the public internet and have it be "private". If people with the skills -- and there are plenty of them; surprise, they don't all work at Facebbok -- put in the effort they can get the data. All they need is a reason/motivation to do so.

But let's have some more embarassing "tech journalism" (uninformed pontification) from a once respected journal. Put more nails in the coffin of the notion of "professional journalism".