Facebook say that this info is already in the public domain, but it seems the issue is a bit more 'in-depth' than that.
And some of the comments that 'Facebook' have made about this info is, in itself, a little odd when you read between the lines;
In a statement to BBC News, Facebook said that the information in the list was already freely available online.
"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 statement read.
And this is the point.. with whom and when... not by some research group gathering data as they so please.
and here is the argument against Facebook;
"Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it," he 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 added.
Mr Davies said that the trawl of data fed into "the confusion of the privacy settings". "This highlights the argument for a higher level of privacy and proves the case for default nondisclosure," he said.
"There are going to be a lot of angry and concerned people right now who be wondering who has their data and what they should do."
And too right too... I am glad I am not on Facebook, or anything similar.. I get quite few friends ending me "reminders" to join up, but I just keep deleting the requests.. no matter how good a friend they, or I, are.
IMO, my privacy is my own and I will choose what to do with it. Facebook has been made into something that 'appears' to be a must-have.. If you're not on it, you're not connected.. It gives this impression, yet this info collected just goes to show how potentially damaging this is to everyones privacy..
i dread to think how much info has been collected by governments and the like.
www.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)
mod edit: to change quote tags to ex tags
MOD NOTE: Posting work written by others
[edit on Wed Jul 28 2010 by DontTreadOnMe]
Twitter may not make it
public but we've all seen hackers get into private systems before so why increase your risk by giving out private information?
