08 Aug
Posted by: Darcy Trugernanner in: Identity Theft
Facebook takes on the issue is the data that was scraped wasn’t private at all. To a degree, I agree. The data is being shared through the site, it’s already public.
Here’s how it went down: a good guy hacker developed a program that went through all 500 million profiles and was able to skim (scrape) all the data from Facebook that wasn’t locked down via the users Facebook privacy settings. Basically if you didn’t lock your privacy settings down, it’s now available in this file. If you lock down your settings today, it’s still in this file.
What’s the point? Hackers like to tinker, and some like to make a point. It seems the hacker here wanted to make a point that your data on social media is up for grabs whether you like it or not.
What’s the risk? It seems the format and way the data was compiled is now searchable in a way that can benefit advertisers and marketers. Can it be used by