Facebook Inc(NASDAQ:FB) is known to have no scruples
about taking users private details and using them for its own purposes, mostly
to generate revenues from targeted advertisements.
And users try to guard their privacy zealously. If
they only knew how cheaply the information they hold dear is being traded in
the outside world, it would make them squirm.
Some one million Facebook users' names have been
bought by a Bulgarian blogger for about five dollars. Bogomail Shopov, who is
also a digital rights activist bought the entire collection of 1.1 million
Facebook names, user IDs and emails posted to the social marketing site
Gigbucks earlier this month.
“I just bought more than 1 million… Facebook data
entries,” Shopov wrote on his blog on Tuesday. “OMG!”
Andy Greenberg of Forbes spoke to Shopov about his
purchase.
"When I reached Shopov on the phone, he said that
he had verified several names and email addresses of his own friends among the
list. And he says the data wasn’t merely scraped from public profiles–he
checked several email addresses to confirm that they weren’t publicly displayed
on the users’ pages."
The data was sold by a Gigbucks user who collected it
from various Facebook applications. Any application on the Facebook platform
asks for permission to allow it to use user's information as well as
information about their friends.
Once this information is in the hands of the
application, which is run by third party developers, users have little or no
control over it and no way of knowing how it is being utilised.
Greenburg said that Facebook sent him a statement
saying that it was looking into the apparent breach of its users' data, as it
exposed them to the dangers of spamming and phishing attacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment