CASE 159: Facebook or Face Off!
Consider this public news story:
"The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and
published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to
make their publicly available information private.
An online security consultant used code to scan the 500
million Facebook profiles for information not hidden by privacy settings. The file
allows people to perform searches of various different types and several
thousand people by now downloaded it.
This means that if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy
settings on Facebook, anyone who has the file will still be able to access
information that was public when it was compiled.
The consultant's actions also mean people who had set their privacy settings
so their names did not appear in Facebook's search system can now be found if
they were friends with anyone whose name was searchable.
The consultant wrote, "Facebook helpfully informs you "[a]nyone can opt out
of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings" - but that doesn't
help much anymore considering I already have them all (and you will too, when
you download the torrent).
Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their
picture, friends, information about them, and some other details. If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their
name and picture. Therefore, if any searchable user has friends that are
non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not!
Oops"
(Source: MSNBC)
1.
Was it permissible for the consultant to
scan the 500 million profiles not hidden by privacy settings?
2. Was it permissible to post it?
3. Was it permissible for the initial individuals
to download the information?
4. Now that the information is publicly available,
is it permissible to download the information and to figure out the names of
those who hid their information by setting their privacy settings high? Is it ethical?
What is the law?
Please email us with your comments and answers at weekly@projectfellow.org.
Read next week's issue for the answer!
