Major Companies Are Downloading the Data From....

Major Companies Are Downloading the Data From Those 100 Million Public Facebook Profiles!

I don't know if anyone has herd of this, but public data from 100 milion Facebook profiles was uploaded as a torrent file, and the interesting part is that the list of IPs that were downlading the torrent file were matched with companies/providers, and a final list was composed with the Major Comapnies Downloading...and guess what?

From:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1675872/major...cebook-profiles

Remember yesterday, when I said that you can all stop freaking out about those 100 million "hacked" Facebook profiles? Well, I wasn't wrong, but the number of major corporations who have been shown to have downloaded that data is big and scary enough to be slightly worrisome.

The data collected was public, of course--all of these corporations could have just found this data on Google. But after white hat hacker (the good kind, if your definition of "good" is malleable) Ron Bowles collected all of this public data and smushed it into one massive file, it may have sparked an interest that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Sure, these companies could have found this data elsewhere, at any time--but they likely didn't. Public information on a Facebook page is still public, and public means your friends as well as sort of scary corporations like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin have access to it.

A Gizmodo reader found that software called Peer Block (as well as others, but that's the one he used) can find the IP of any other user downloading that file. It also identifies the source of that IP, often an entity like a company, college, or other organization. So he looked through the list and picked out some of the ones that popped out at him.

Of course, we should note that just because an IP address associated with a company downloaded this file, it doesn't mean that that company requested the file be downloaded, or is even aware that it was. A single Halliburton employee might've read Fast Company and downloaded the torrent file at work to see what the hubbub is about, and bam, now Halliburton's on the list. Also, some of these organizations, like the BBC, Viacom, Time Warner, and Turner, have news branches, which would be a logical and forgiveable reason to download the file.

Without further ado, the list. The linked names are companies on our Most Innovative Companies list.

A.C. Nielsen; Agilent Technologies; Apple; AT&T, possibly Macrovision; Baker & McKenzie; BBC; Bertelsmann Media; Boeing; Church of Scientology; Cisco Systems; Cox Enterprises; Davis Polk & Wardwell; Deutsche Telekom; Disney; Duracell; Ernst & Young; Fujitsu; Goldman Sachs; Halliburton; HBO & Company; Hilton Hospitality; Hitachi; HP; IBM; Intel; Intuit; Levi Strauss & Co.; Lockheed-Martin Corp; Lucasfilm; Lucent Technologies; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co; Mcafee; MetLife; Mitsubishi; Motorola; Northrop Grumman; Novell; Nvidia; O'Melveny & Myers; Oracle Corp; Pepsi Cola; Procter and Gamble; Random House; Raytheon; Road Runner RRWE; Seagate; Sega; Siemens AG; Sony Corporation; Sprint; Sun Microsystems; Symantec; The Hague; Time Warner Telecom; Turner Broadcasting System; Ubisoft Entertainment; Unisys; United Nations; Univision; USPS; Viacom; Vodafone; Wells Fargo; Xerox PARC

END

Maybe they do care enough to roll out a market analysis or whatever, but there actions in general...are just a bit confussing.

 

Wow companies jump on consumer intel that will be used for direct marketing. Big news.

Ive never used facebook (past that one Sega petition) and this certainly won't make me consider it more.

 

Totally agree about facebook I have a profile which I have probably only used on a handful of occasions, they clearly have no respect for their users selling/giving away our private data so we can be spammed to death by advertisors, ppl should check the small print

http://www.allnel.com/2010/03/truth-about-facebook-may-make-you-wanna.html