Change Those Facebook Privacy Settings Yet?

So the news that 100 million facebook (FB) users' information such as links to their FB sites, phone numbers, dates of birth, etc. had been extracted by a program that put them into a tidy 2.8GB file hit last week.

This file is now available on torrent websites, and if your privacy settings aren't on "friends only" or "private", you probably ended up on that list.

100 million FB users = 20% of all users. After all the kicking and screaming about privacy, it still seems to be a problem.

Another interesting fact about this data file is that it has been downloaded from some pretty prominent organizations. Now, there's no saying whether or not you'll end up on some SPAM list for the Church of Scientology, but there's a good chance that someone at one of these organizations will utilize this information in some fashion. Here's the list (so far):

A.C. Nielsen
Agilent Technologies
Apple
AT&T - Possible 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
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

So what can we do about it? Tighten up those security controls and watch the lawsuits fly. FB is the new way people stay in touch and "dropping out" really isn't an option once you join. I've seen it happen, and I've seen relationships die off and people join up again.

So please, change your security controls unless you're OK with Halliburton using your profile pic in some corporate training seminar or Wells Fargo sending you free Checking on your birthday.

-Nate

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/facebook-torrent-bittorrent-profile-pictures,10976.html