ectoplasmosis: Two days ago, a blogger called Bogomep reported that he was able to purchase more than one million Facebook data entries (usernames, full names, verified email addresses, etc) from the piddling sum of $5. The description of the offer said: The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe. There are users from other countries as well but they are almost exclusively English speaking as well, as all the apps we provide are written in English and to use them properly one needs to read the instructions. The list is checked and validated once a month so you won’t get a list full of invalid or duplicate email addresses. Whether you are offering a Facebook, Twitter, social media related or otherwise a general product or service, this list has a great potential for you. Finally, the list is in a zipped excel format split into 12 sheets, each sheet containing roughly 100,000 email addresses with name, last name and facebook profile information separated with comma. Today, he posts about the troubling and officious phone call he received from Facebook’s “Policy” department, which the Facebook representatives forbid him from posting about or discussing with anyone.  Naturally, and admirably, he posted about it anyway: Our conversation began exatly on the agreed minute and with the warning that it “is being recorded”. The part where they usually say that it is for the purpose of “improving the service” was spared. They thanked me for what I have done but they also asked me that I did not share the information about our talk in my profile (?!?) and my blog. “Now we would like you to send us this file, delete it, tell us if you have given a copy of it to someone, give us the website from which you bought it including all transactions with it and the payment system and remove a couple of things from your blog. Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation; it is a secret that we are even having this conversation”. I agreed to send them the data and the website of course, for that was my purpose. I tried to ask what they would do next but they said it would be an internal legal investigation. I asked if it was possible to tell what the problem was, after they finished the investigation, so that the users could protect themselves, but they they emphasized that it would be an internal investigation and they would not share any information with third parties. If you’ve been waiting for that last push to unyoke yourself from Aunt Terri’s racist screeds, your girlfriend’s father’s creepy “Like” tours of every female photo subject in every photo album he can find, and the insipid and unceasing demands from barely-acknowledged coworkers to feed their Zynga addictions, this might be your chance. source: http://talkweb.eu/openweb/1819 EDIT: It is worth noting that Facebook posted an operating loss of over 59 million dollars last quarter, and “casual gaming” baron Zynga lost 52 million the same quarter, and razed its Japan, UK, and Boston studios and fired 5% of staff.  These are all excellent motivations for either company, or their recent employees, to be hawking cheap, unsecured user data. Sounds legit. Facebook is totally going to make up for a 59 million dollars loss by selling spammers some lists of users (most likely public) data for 5$. If that list is “more than a million users”, considering Facebook has a billion users, you could get a complete list for less than 5000$? This makes all sense. Or… Or some guy just scrapped public data from Facebook pages or through the API, and is trying to monetise it. Some goon, exploiting users’ lack of awareness regarding private/public information. Could it be? No way, scaremongering always works best than education. People don’t like being told they’re doing it wrong. That paranoiac narrative where you’re the helpless victims of higher powers is much more easy to cope with. Because you can’t do anything about it anyway, except getting a kick from reblogging The Truth Finally Revealed. You might prophet of doom.
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ectoplasmosis:

Two days ago, a blogger called Bogomep reported that he was able to purchase more than one million Facebook data entries (usernames, full names, verified email addresses, etc) from the piddling sum of $5.

The description of the offer said:

The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe. There are users from other countries as well but they are almost exclusively English speaking as well, as all the apps we provide are written in English and to use them properly one needs to read the instructions. The list is checked and validated once a month so you won’t get a list full of invalid or duplicate email addresses. Whether you are offering a Facebook, Twitter, social media related or otherwise a general product or service, this list has a great potential for you. Finally, the list is in a zipped excel format split into 12 sheets, each sheet containing roughly 100,000 email addresses with name, last name and facebook profile information separated with comma.

Today, he posts about the troubling and officious phone call he received from Facebook’s “Policy” department, which the Facebook representatives forbid him from posting about or discussing with anyone.  Naturally, and admirably, he posted about it anyway:

Our conversation began exatly on the agreed minute and with the warning that it “is being recorded”. The part where they usually say that it is for the purpose of “improving the service” was spared.

They thanked me for what I have done but they also asked me that I did not share the information about our talk in my profile (?!?) and my blog.

“Now we would like you to send us this file, delete it, tell us if you have given a copy of it to someone, give us the website from which you bought it including all transactions with it and the payment system and remove a couple of things from your blog. Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation; it is a secret that we are even having this conversation”.

I agreed to send them the data and the website of course, for that was my purpose. I tried to ask what they would do next but they said it would be an internal legal investigation.

I asked if it was possible to tell what the problem was, after they finished the investigation, so that the users could protect themselves, but they they emphasized that it would be an internal investigation and they would not share any information with third parties.

If you’ve been waiting for that last push to unyoke yourself from Aunt Terri’s racist screeds, your girlfriend’s father’s creepy “Like” tours of every female photo subject in every photo album he can find, and the insipid and unceasing demands from barely-acknowledged coworkers to feed their Zynga addictions, this might be your chance.

source: http://talkweb.eu/openweb/1819

EDIT: It is worth noting that Facebook posted an operating loss of over 59 million dollars last quarter, and “casual gaming” baron Zynga lost 52 million the same quarter, and razed its Japan, UK, and Boston studios and fired 5% of staff.  These are all excellent motivations for either company, or their recent employees, to be hawking cheap, unsecured user data.

Sounds legit. Facebook is totally going to make up for a 59 million dollars loss by selling spammers some lists of users (most likely public) data for 5$.

If that list is “more than a million users”, considering Facebook has a billion users, you could get a complete list for less than 5000$?

This makes all sense.

Or…

Or some guy just scrapped public data from Facebook pages or through the API, and is trying to monetise it. Some goon, exploiting users’ lack of awareness regarding private/public information. Could it be?

No way, scaremongering always works best than education. People don’t like being told they’re doing it wrong. That paranoiac narrative where you’re the helpless victims of higher powers is much more easy to cope with. Because you can’t do anything about it anyway, except getting a kick from reblogging The Truth Finally Revealed. You might prophet of doom.

18 Notes/ Hide

  1. roomfullofsmoothoperators reblogged this from roguecnidarian
  2. cynicaltechnophile reblogged this from roguecnidarian
  3. roguecnidarian reblogged this from ectoplasmosis
  4. yhancik reblogged this from ectoplasmosis and added:
    Sounds legit. Facebook is totally going to make up for a 59 million dollars loss by selling spammers some lists of users...
  5. gurosebe reblogged this from teratocybernetics
  6. jellyfishdirigible reblogged this from teratocybernetics
  7. michaelk42 said: Of course, by reblogging this, it got sent to my Twitter, which Facebook is all too happy to leech posts from and post on my zombie timeline.
  8. teratocybernetics reblogged this from ectoplasmosis
  9. michaelk42 reblogged this from ectoplasmosis
  10. ectoplasmosis posted this

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