A fellow Canadian, Ron Bowes has done something very interesting. He developed some applications that accessed facebook and gathered the following information from 171 Million of their registered members.
The URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile
The name of every searchable Facebook user, both unique and by count (perfect for post-processing, datamining, etc)
Processed lists, including first names with count, last names with count, potential usernames with count, etc
So now you are wondering, what did he do with this information? Simple, he shared it with the world, it is now being shared between thousands of people since its release yesterday and more people are uploading it to file-sharing services like rapidshare and hotfile so that you and all your friends can download the data as well.
Now, what makes this fun is, at this time, the urls of the 171 million users that you find in his file are all the users he found that have their privacy settings wide open for now. Since this is hitting the news, it is only certain that millions of members will panic and either leave the site..Good riddance, or they will change their privacy settings. It will not do them any good because this information was harvested before they changed their settings and now it is falling into the hands of thousands daily, including internet marketers, hackers (the ones who use brute force dictionary based attacks) and many other wonderful people who are very thank full for this plentiful harvest from fellow Canadian Ron Bowes.
You can read his blog over
HERE and see download links posted there and detailed information on his work. He is hitting headline news with this in a big way, so his efforts are being recognized by the media and masses. I hope that many can benefit from this information and profit from it as well.
I can think of at least 873 million things to do with this data, but thats just me, I am sure everyone has their own ideas.
Thank you Ron.
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