Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

This week BBC news posted an interesting story:

Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been harvested and published on the net by a security consultant.

Ron Bowles used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.

Time to panic maybe? Well, not perhaps if you keep reading:

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.

Not perhaps so bad then, given the name and URL of every FaceBook user is already available within FaceBook itself – I mean if you are searching for someone, you could go to the FaceBook page, type their name in, then see a list of people with pictures etc, or, you could use this offline data set and just get their URL’s and IDs.

I guess it’s useful if you want to translate a FaceBook id into a name, but for me, this is a bit of a blown-out-of-proportion non-event.

maybe I am missing something?