BBC News - Details of 100m Facebook users collected and published

Ron Bowes wrote some software which scanned through Facebook to capture any unprotected personal information from the website.

The collected data has been compiled in to a huge file which is available over BitTorrent among other free channels.

While the program did not access any protected information, it has exposed any and all users who have not taken the proper steps to restrict access to their Facebook accounts, either through error or lack of knowledge, awareness or prudence.

The fact that it has been captured and distributed also makes it impossible to ever effectively change or remove any of the collected information. It is out there in the wild and out of anyones hands or ability to corral or correct.

This link will download the big (2.79GB) compressed database for you right now using a BitTorrent client (it may break at some point).

In this article “I don’t bleepin’ believe it” ComputerWorld reports on a UK insurer raising rates on social network users. The reason points back to something I have been talking about for some time. People post travel information to their social network sites. They say when they will be away from home, and for how long. This is perfect fodder for thieves, who can typically also collect enough information about the posters to identify them and find where they live.

This is why I don’t blog, Twitter, or otherwise post about conferences I am going to, even though it would be great to use social networks to connect with folks at the conference or in the conference city.

Google and India Test the Limits of Liberty - WSJ.com

In this case, it is not the search engine, but their social networking site “Orkut” which is the issue. Google’s troubles stem less from their actions than the fact that they are the dominant social networking site in India, and so most of those issues happen on that site.

Google has been forced to take down a lot of content, and hand over the identities of many posters. If the examples in the article are to be believed, the threshold for censorship is not high.

At the risk of repeating myself, if you live in India and you want to say something that might push or cross the line, do it with robust anonymity technology. You might still have your post taken down, but they can’t come after you.

Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt - washingtonpost.com  For a short time Facebook became the center of a fledgling activist movement in Egypt. Over 74,000 people registered on a Facebook page devoted to this issue. It became the primary communications path for this group, and enabled its explosive growth. It also contained the seeds of its rapid unwinding and the arrest and beating of the creator of that page.To me this is yet another example of the “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog” syndrome. People feel so comfortable in front of their computers, they will say and do things they would fear to do in public or face to face. Facebook is in no way anonymous, nor does it claim to be. While there are many tools that could have enabled these people to operate and organize anonymously, there is no evidence that they used any of them.The Internet is very powerful, but it is also very public. People wishing to use it in repressive countries need to take special care to protect themselves and their visitors. 

New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends - WSJ.com This article does not break any new ground, but does a nice job of listing and discussing a number of tools one can use to gather information on people. They pull from on-line information sources as well as public records for things like criminal history. For employers, it would be a good place to start before hiring someone to do a full background check.The big take away at the end is that you need to make sure you reduce your Internet footprint, specifically by taking care to check the privacy box on many sites, and to simply provide no or false information to others. For example, although I would never provide a wrong age to gain access to a restricted website, I almost never provide my correct birthday because to many other sites (like banks) use that as part of your identity verification. 

Online privacy? For young people, that’s old-school - USATODAY.com

Being over 35, I fall in to the “old-school” category described in this article. While I have presence on a number of social networking sights I have been very stingy with the information I have posted there. I think the root cause of the high risk behavior on these sites is in the way they are used. People treat them as an extension of in person, phone, and text message communications. It is just one more mode of communication. Unfortunately this mode of communication has some significant differences. The most important is that it is generally very public, searchable, and archived. It is almost impossible to take something back once it makes its way out on to the net.

As a high school or college student, it may be cool to show the dark side of your personality and not to care what people think. 5-10 years later when you are looking for a job with a high level of trust, requiring a clean reputation, the historical artifacts floating out on the web may turn out to be a real disadvantage.

It may turn out one day that our culture comes to understand this trend and ignores youthful indiscretions memorialized on the Internet, but I would not want to bet my future on that level of forgiveness.