This isn’t quite as bad as it seems, but it does give you a sense of what’s possible with all of the data on Facebook. A hacker named Ron Bowes from Skull Security wrote a crawler to compile data from all the publicly available pages on Facebook. Publicly available – that’s important.
It’s also important, though, that such a crawler could be written to grab that kind of data. Though you could just as easily search for these people and get their info, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that a bot could be written to compile the same. Facebook security remains a shifting target – for most people, there’s not a lot on Facebook they don’t want people to see. As Facebook continues to grow and expand its profitable operations, there could potentially be more and more truly personal data involved. In fact, that’s how Zuckerberg would prefer things. That’s why this is important.
I’ve been thinking about kicking Facebook for a while, and every time I get a story like this, even as unalarming and completely benign as this story is, it points to the ongoing lack of attention and concern it seems Facebook gives to user data.
