Profiles of 100 mn Facebook users leaked online

London, July 29 (IANS) The personal details of 100 million users of social networking website Facebook are now available for download after they were leaked online.

Ron Bowles, an online security consultant, used a code to scan Facebook profiles, collected data not hidden by users' privacy settings, and compiled a list, which is now available as a downloadable file, containing the URL of every 'searchable' Facebook user's profile, their name and unique ID, the BBC reported Thursday.

Bowles said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook retorted by saying the information was already public.

'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,' the website said.

'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.'

'No private data is available or has been compromised,' Facebook said.

The list has already been downloaded by over 1,000 people on Pirate Bay, the world's biggest file-sharing website.

One user, going by the name of 'lusifer69', said the list was 'awesome and a little terrifying'.

But internet watchdog Privacy International said Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen.

'Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it,' Simon Davies, an official of Privacy International, said.

'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, he said.

Facebook hit 500 million users in June this year.

Courtesy: Yahoo>>Technology

Social media - most important data

 "Social Media is not the most important thing right now. It is the shift from computers to mobile based computing platforms", as suggested by a digital marketing leader - WPP Group. 

With Facebook exceeding 0.5 Billion users, just under six years that it has been launched, many others have not done so well. Below is some 'hard data' to explain this:

Facebook's empire at risk

Facebook has announced that now it has over 500,000,000 active friends in its network. It clearly means Facebook is not just another networking phenomenon but it is the company changing our lives and the was businesses see consumers and market segments.

With so much happening with them, how can Facebook loose its 'Face' to the market?

1. Alternatives - There are enough of these research projects out there in the market like OneSocialWeb, the Appleseed Project and WebFinger. Getting these open protcols into decent shape one can build them into an improbably powerful stack. This might mean your social profiles in future could automatically behave in a certain pre-defined way. This could mean it communicating with your data around automatically and keeping itself updated all the time.

2. Google Me - Google tried hard luck with a lot of community applications such as Orkut but lost the battle to Facebook (now in the final phases of loosing their strongest markets - India and Brazil to Facebook). They came out with Google Buzz as an answer to Twitter but it didn't gave them much benefit apart from the Threaded views and discussions.

3. Specific mobile computing services - As correctly put by market leaders Wunderman, "the most important thing right now is not social networking. It is the change from computer based applications to mobile computing platform". Apparently the wiz kids might come up with something more local and more specific to the locational requirements.

4. Postal Service - Everybody might just love the retro feel of the postal service and might just get back out from the social networking thing. Personally I would love writing letters but most of my contacts might not, so waiting for the phenomenon to take a lead.

5. Lust for money and glory - The free-to-register and free-to-use Facebook service might seem very good to most of the users but those who belong to marketing fraternity will understand how important it is to disable all their advertising options on facebook on their social profiles otherwise their emails and direct messages might all be full of companies promoting baby diapers and duty-free liquor.