New York – Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been collected and published on the net by a security consultant.
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Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.
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.
Mr Bowes said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information.
The file has spread rapidly across the net.
On the Pirate Bay, the world’s biggest file-sharing website, the list was being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users.
One user, going by the name of lusifer69, described the list as “awesome and a little terrifying”.
In a statement to BBC News, Facebook said that the information in the list was already freely available online.
“People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want,” the statement read.
“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.
“No private data is available or has been compromised,” the statement added.
that would ‘splain a thing or two about strange things happening.