UNI TECH BLOG I

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LONDON: The personal details of 100 million users of social networking website Facebook are now available for download after they were leaked online.

Ron Bowles, an online security consultant, used a code to scan Facebook profiles, collected data not hidden by users’ privacy settings, and compiled a list, which is now available as a downloadable file, containing the URL of every “searchable” Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID, the BBC reported Thursday.

Bowles said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook retorted by saying the information was already public.

“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 website said.

“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,” Facebook said.

The list has already been downloaded by over 1,000 people on Pirate Bay, the world’s biggest file-sharing website. One user, going by the name of “lusifer69″, said the list was “awesome and a little terrifying.”

But internet watchdog Privacy International said Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen.

“Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it,” Simon Davies, an official of Privacy International, said.

“It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn’t have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there’s an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence,” he said.

Facebook hit 500 million users in June this year.

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Courtney Purvin got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.

The friend had died in April. “It kind of freaked me out a bit,” she said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”

Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, knows a lot about its roughly 500 million members. Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the company has had trouble automating the task of figuring out when one of its users has died.

That can lead to some disturbing moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shuffling a dead friend through its social algorithms. Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle the ghosts in its machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution.

“It’s a very sensitive topic,” said Meredith Chin, a company spokeswoman, “and, of course, seeing deceased friends pop up can be painful.” Given the site’s size, “and people passing away every day, we’re never going to be perfect at catching it,” she added.

Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group. People over 65, of course, also have the country’s highest mortality rate, so the problem is only going to get worse.

“The way to make this work in cases where machines can’t make decisions is to tap into the members,” said Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester Research, pointing to Facebook’s buttons that allow users to flag inappropriate material . “One way to automate the ‘Is he dead’ problem is to have a place where people can report it.”

That’s just what Facebook does. To memorialize a profile, a family member or friend must fill out a form on the site and provide proof of the death, like a link to an obituary or news article , which a staff member at Facebook will then review.
But this option is not well publicized, so many profiles of dead members never are converted to tribute pages.

WASHINGTON: Microsoft added Facebook to Outlook, giving users of its popular email program the ability to view status updates, pictures and wall posts from their friends on the social network.

Outlook now lets email users view the profile picture and activity of their Facebook friends in a box called the “People Pane.”

“You can view your social network as you look through your email to stay connected with your friends, family, and colleagues,” Paco Contreras Herrera, a group product manager for Microsoft Office, said in a blog post.

Microsoft integrated two other social networks, MySpace and LinkedIn, into Outlook in February using what it calls the “Outlook Social Connector.”

“The Outlook Social Connector doesn’t add another social network into the mix; rather it offers busy people the convenience of accessing them in Outlook,” Contreras Herrera said. “We expect more partners down the line,” he added.

Outlook 2003 and 2007 users can download the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector from the Microsoft Download Center while Outlook 2010 users can get it through Microsoft Update.

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AFP

WASHINGTON: Internet security firm Sophos has warned Facebook users to be on the alert for a scam which sends a spam message to all of their friends on the social network.

Sophos, in a pair of blog posts said “hundreds of thousands” of Facebook users have fallen for the scam which it dubbed “likejacking.”

It said some Facebook users had received a message such as “This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!” and were encouraged to click on a link.

Sophos said clicking on the link takes a Facebook user to what appears to be a blank page with a “Click here to continue” message.

Sophos said clicking on the page publishes the original message on their own Facebook page with a “like” notation and recommends it to all of their Facebook friends.

“This of course posts a message to your newsfeed, your friends see it and click on it, and so it spreads,” Sophos said.

Sophos warned last week about a Facebook scam designed to trick users into installing adware, a software package that automatically plays, displays or downloads advertisements to their computer.

That followed a similar scam that spread on Facebook the week before involving a fake posting tagged as the “sexiest video ever,” according to Sophos.