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A security researcher has compiled the names and URLs of more than 100 million Facebook accounts and made the data available on BitTorrent. Ron Bowles, a self-described certified penetration tester, claims to have used some code he wrote quickly to harvest the information from individuals who set their privacy settings to be accessible by search engines.
“Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details,“ Bowles wrote in a blog post. “If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops :).“
Bowles website was unavailable, though the reasons are unclear. Facebook has strict policies forbidding the harvesting of its content.
Facebook responded to the incident by reiterating that users can make their accounts unavailable to search engines.
