100 Million User Data Spreads on Bittorrent Sites

Ron Bowes, a security consultant at Nmap, has caused quite a turbulence in news earlier this week as he made available through file-sharing sites the public Facebook profiles of 100 million users of the social networking site which makes about 20% of the site's global membership.

Facebook hurried to smother worries saying that the information that has been gathered (around 2.8 gigabytes) is in the public domain and no confidential data has been compromised due to security breach.

"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", said the company in a statement.
According to The BBC newswire, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, has warned a few times in the past about the risk of such exposure.

"Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it", BBC quotes him.

"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", Davies added.

He continued by emphasizing how confused users of such social networking sites are, in fact, when it comes to privacy settings and pointed to the revision of Facebook's privacy settings a few months ago, saying"People did not understand the privacy settings and this is the result."