Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook

Post date: Jan 8, 2010 10:33:00 PM

According to a January 05, 2010 article by Ryan Singel, in Wired, the recent changes to Facebook's privacy settings may have opened a door allowing "rogue marketers" to harvest e-mail addresses and profile data from subscribers. The hack was publicized by blogger Max Klein. All that is needed to exploit the vulnerability is a subscriber's e-mail address, the report states, giving hackers access to profiles for everyone in the subscriber's network. News of the vulnerability has raised the hackles of privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kevin Bankston who said: "Just because Facebook users want to share personal info with their friends does not mean they want to share it with any nefarious parties on the Internet..."