Facebook member data put on BitTorrent site

The names of 100 million Facebook members, along with the URLs of personal profile pages have been published on a BitTorrent site by campaigners making a point about online privacy.

Details relating to 20 per cent of the site's members appear on the list, having been 'scraped' from Facebook by a Canadian online security consultant.

It doesn't show the user's whole profile nor their password or details of personal settings, though. It also doesn't include any other publicly available information such as email addresses or telephone numbers.

Bowes said he gathered the information while researching the most common names, which in turn could potentially be valuable to hackers. He published it to share it with other researchers.

He also hoped the move might highlight how much information is in the public domain and how it can be used.

The list - which appears on a BitTorrent site via Ron Bowes' blog on SkullSecurity.org - only includes profiles of people who have Public Search Listings available on Facebook - meaning that the profile can be found through search engines anyway.

The Skull Security site was offline at the time of writing.

Alex Deane, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, warned: "The internet is not a private place. Stop broadcasting things about yourself if you wish them to remain private."

"Not everyone will be as scrupulous as Mr Bowles, and everyone using Facebook or other social-networking sites should now think about this incident long and hard before they put private information on their profiles."

Deane continued: "Those with such material already there should think seriously about taking it down. Those who wish to keep such information online should use the privacy settings available to them to restrict their availability."

A spokeswoman for Facebook told Web User: "This information already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook. No private data is available or has been compromised."

"Similar to a phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook. If someone does not want to be found, we also offer a number of controls to enable people not to appear in search on Facebook, in search engines, or share any information with applications," she continued.

The spokeswoman also added that the site's terms prohibit the act of 'scraping' data from the site and if the details in the BitTorrent list are deemed to have violated these terms then Facebook will take necessary legal action.

This is the latest in a long line of privacy issues that Facebook has had to deal with. Changes made to settings last year caused outcry among members and led to simplified privacy settings being introduced in May.

Many people at the time deleted or threatened to delete their account because of the controversy and this week it emerged that Facebook has been trialling a simpler delete account function.