Facebook user data leaked to demonstrate security concerns

Facebook, already facing criticism over its attitude to privacy concerns and user data, suffered an embarrassing incident yesterday when details of more than 100 million of its users were leaked on the internet.

More than a fifth of Facebook's 500 million users details have been published on filesharing site Pirate Bay, in a move by security consultant Ron Bowles, intended to highlight problems with Facebook's privacy settings. The user list contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile, their name and their unique ID. Bowles told the BBC that he used a simple piece of code to scan and collect data from Facebook profiles which are not protected by the user's privacy settings.

Facebook maintains that the data which was published was already in the public domain and does not compromise users' privacy. In a statement the company said: "People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want.  In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook." The statement went on to say "It is similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook."

However, Simon Davies, head of campaign group Privacy International, disagrees: "There are going to be a lot of angry and concerned people right now who will be wondering who has their data and what they should do. It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence.”

Facebook may insist that the leaked users' data was already in the public domain, but the question remains as to whether those users intended it to be there. Facebook has already come in for a storm of criticism for its overly complicated privacy settings which tend towards sharing, rather than non-disclosure, as a default - and while some of the 100 million users may not care whether their data is made public, there will be others who never intended that and simply didn't get their Facebook privacy settings right.