Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent

Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent
Jul 29, 2010 - By Jason Chen - Source : Gizmodo

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Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested.

Reader Clint discovered that all you had to do is use something like Peer Block, which grabs the IPs of the other users also downloading the torrent and identifies which company or university or organization they belong to. You can check this yourself by hopping on the torrent and doing the same thing.

Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent. A couple caveats to these. Just because a company is on the list, doesn't mean that it's a sanctioned download by the company itself to grab the user information for some purpose. It could easily just be some dude at the company who wanted to download the torrent himself to check it out. Also, the IP addresses assigned to a company might fluctuate (they usually don't, much, unless major companies change their connection to the internet, so it should be mostly accurate).

A.C. Nielsen
Agilent Technologies
Apple Computer
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

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:source: Source: http://gizmodo.com/5599970/major-cor...off-bittorrent

Guess you can start expecting spam and friend requests from a lot of these companies if you're one of the 100 million Fecesbook members who ended up on the list. I could see AC Neisen happy to anayze the data; Xerox PARC wanting to experiment with it; or Levi Strauss or P&G wanting to try and do marketing with it; but I'm not sure what Northrop Grumman or Halliburton need this type of consumerish data for. Plus a few of the names look like law firms... maybe they see the potential for some kind of juicy class-action lawsuit coming up!

I don't belong to facebook or twitter, but I have registered for sites like this and I wish it were not a necessity. Any site you sign up or register for will at the least have a good e-mail address on you, and if the site goes down, is maliciously hacked, or just gets sold into the hands of some moron, your data is at risk. In the early days of my torrenting I signed up to MegaNova, IsoHunt and MiniNova. I'm still visiting MiniNova but I wish I could close out my account and clear the info. With crap like this happening all over, any site worth a darn should offer that option if they really wish their friends and associates to have some safety in the registration process. Heck, when a new guy bought the rights to uTorrent I refused to use the newer versions for fear they were really tracking me so I still uise 1.6 to this day even though many have said its safe to update. The guy who took over uTorrent was a known MPAA RIAA friend or in the least had worked for them in some capacity previously.

So, really, can someone tell me what the big f'ing deal is on this? Someone wrote some code to gather all the names and associated urls for those names. Yes, I did download this because I wanted to see what, if any, information there was about me. The names on this this are publicly available via a search on the site, so what? It doesn't give any more info, like addresses, friends, interests, etc.

I guess its more a "what if" thing. What if this guy is practicing, so later on he can hack a banks data base and get your account numbers, social security and passwords and empty your aaccount. No data stealing is completely innocent. Just your e-mail would allow me to spam the heck out of you and possibly trick you into opening a poisoned one and turn your PC into a bot slave to spam all your friends in your contacts folder, and just generally use your machine to do my dirty work. Don't be fooled, the world is loaded with unscrupulous characters who would sell their mother for a buck. And it gets worse every day as little tykes learn to code and make trojans and viruses as their criminal friends egg them on. I'd imagine there are several on this site right now.