This time it’s a systemic flaw that Facebook admits to; the gist of it is that if someone knows your e-mail address, they can find you even if you’ve restricted search privacy.
Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook
Don’t be fooled by the title, anybody can mine your info this way thanks to the new privacy settings.
Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
Using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of e-mail addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of marketing profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends, depending on how users have their profiles set. Run a few algorithms on that data and you can start to make inferences about race, income, sexual orientation and interests.
I suppose a marketer *could* do this, but it would take a lot of time and money per data entry. FB already has all of this information, right?
When I read the article the first thing I thought was “misdirection.” Actually getting hacked wouldn’t make FB any money, but it could cover the transfer of “compromised” data. At any rate, at this point it will take a lot more than that to have any effect whatsoever on the virtual agriculturalist horde.