Personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been posted publically online.

The list is available as a freely downloadable file from the file sharing site Pirate Bay & has already been downloaded over 3000 times.

Facebook has responded by saying that all the information it contains is already available via publically browsing a users page or via a basic search engine search. “No private data is available or has been compromised,” Facebook said.

What makes this content truly useful though is the manner in which it is presented. It is ordered and collated in such a manner as to be useful & searchable.

So, no private data but this still highlights the amount of information that people freely (arguably unaware they’re doing so) on sites like Facebook by leaving the default privacy settings.

(Another) Attack on Facebook Privacy Policy

I’ve recently watched & read two things that got my thinking about privacy & visibility on the internet.

Erasing David is a true documentary about a father who decides to go “underground” and avoid detection for a month. He hires a team of private investigators to track him down. I don’t want to give too much away but suffice to say it didn’t take as long as you may think!

The other was the book -  Roadside Crosses by Jeffery Deaver. Both of which I highly recommend whether you buy from Amazon (above links), beg, borrow or download (steal) them.

Both deal with privacy and the amount of information that is accessible to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection.

Albeit fictional, Roadside Crosses creates a world where someone is groomed, targeted & tortured purely from the information they post about online.

We all know people who we know post far too much information online about themselves … but don’t you think we’re all guilty of this to a certain extent?

Remember how weird it was to see your house & street for the first time on Google Maps / Google Earth? Well that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

Google have a free tool where anyone can signup and choose to be alerted (via RSS or email) whenever a webpage, social network (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc.)  contains a particular keyphrase.

Professional internet marketers use this to monitor their brand, product or names of key individuals within the company. But unscrupulous users can just as easily use it to keep tabs on anyone they choose.

I’ll use myself as an example

I mention my name on the About page.  From the title tags of the main domain you could guess that I’m based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. Therefore you can also probably find my personal Facebook page, where you can see a picture of me.

I have my profile set to private but imagine if you had left open to public viewing … you’d have access to my photo’s, videos, friends, siblings, parents, date of birth, hometown and age.

Not to mention my wall postings which may or may not be professionally comprimising / embarrasing.

So What?

Well exactly, so what? Let’s remember that you’ve got Google Alerts running on me … so I post on a forum about goat herding (using my email address as the registered address for the account). You now know that I’m into farming / herding goats & from that forum I link to another blog where I posted a comment about how much I hate my job. (I use this for illustration purposes only – I love my job )

Remember, the post on the goat herding forum was posted under a different username, it never mentioned my real name or anything to do with my occupation or location but you found it because I’d used the same email address … which I thought was kept private, but wasn’t.

From this forum post I link to a picture where you see my out in the fields with my goat and it has a picture of my car in the background. Simple, you now have my car make, model & numberplate.

You can now ring the DVLA and request all sorts of information on me because by now you know my:

• Name.
• Age.
• DOB.
• Hometown.
• Email.
• Parents / Siblings (could guess at my password / security question).

There are other ways to get further information such as social engineering but that’s for another day.

The point of this post wasn’t to scare you off the internet, but to make you aware of how much information someone can gather about you, for free, should they wish.

A rule of thumb I always use … every time you hit a key, someone, somewhere can see what you’ve written. Always assume that the information you share will be visible by everyone, forever.