Thaindian News

By Madhuri Dey
July 29, (THAINDIAN NEWS) The privacy settings of the social networking website Facebook has long been a matter of concern for lawmakers and millions of Facebook users. While the company demands that it is working towards securing the private information of the users from leaking on the web, the recent case in point once again has brought to the forefront the faulty internet security settings of the website. A Canadian internet security consultant named Ron Bowes, has come up with a list of limited personal data on about 100 million Facebook users that he collected from the website in an attempt to point to the company’s controversial privacy settings.

As per reports, Ron Bowes used a particular code that was able to fish out information from all Facebook accounts of users who have not opted to hide their profile information manually. The reports claim that the web researcher was not only able to gather information like account names, profile URL and contact details but also phone numbers and email addresses that he did not make public. The code was also able to pull the buddy list. To point to the horrific effect that such a faulty security settings might lead to, Ron Bowes had put all the gathered data on a website from where it can be easily downloaded.

What has increased the concern all the more is that; the action of Ron Bowes cannot be compared or equated to that of a hacker in any way. He had acquired the information that was already freely and legally available online. Simon Davies of London-based Privacy International, said to a media source that “it is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn’t have imagined a trawl of this magnitude”.