Much has been made of a recent Facebook “leak” which allegedly disclosed information on over 100 million Facebook users. What some reports have failed to highlight, however, is that the information was already public to begin with.

Security researcher Ron Bowes wrote a Ruby script that downloads information from Facebook’s user directory, a searchable index of public profile pages. The directory does not expose a user’s entire profile and only exposes information that the user has allowed Facebook to make public. This includes names, profile images, and small sampling of the user’s friends. Users can opt out of inclusion in the search, but could potentially still appear on the directory page of a friend who is searchable.

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"Leaked" data of 100M Facebook users came from public info