Bogomil Shopov, a Bulgarian blogger and digital rights activist, caused an investigation from Facebook when he claimed he had purchased 1.1 million Facebook user email addresses for five dollars. The Bulgarian bought the Facebook names, user IDs and emails after they were posted on social marketing site Gigbucks. After he made the acquisition he wrote on his blog, “I just bought more than 1 million… Facebook data entries. OMG!”
According to Forbes, the social network giant contacted Shopov, who assured them of the authenticity of the acquisition as he “verified several names and email addresses of his own friends among the list.” According to the blogger this showed that the data was not “scraped from public profiles–he checked several email addresses to confirm that they weren’t publicly displayed on the users’ pages.”
Gigbucks user Mertem is the seller of the information and he states that the data was gathered from Facebook applications. In his Gigabucks post he says, “The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Whether you are offering a Facebook, Twitter, social media related or otherwise a general product or service, this list has a great potential for you.”
Facebook told Fores that it was looking into the matter. They also added that, “We have dedicated security engineers and teams that look into and take aggressive action on reports like those raised here. Since this is ongoing, we are not in a position to discuss the investigation at this time.”
According to Forbes, Facebook got back to their people after they had gone through the case and said that the data had been gathered from scraping. Given that this information was public data and according to Facebook was never taken from any sort of application. The social network representation went on to say that, “Facebook is vigilant about protecting our users from those who would try to expose any form of user information. In this case, it appears someone has attempted to scrape information from our site. We have dedicated security engineers and teams that look into and take aggressive action on reports just like these. We continue to investigate this specific individual.”
Forbes claims that Facebook had also contacted Shopov and requested the data. They also asked him to delete the information and remove his blog post discussing the matter. Interestingly, the blogger did not listen to the social network and instead posted on his blog about the Facebook request. Shopov did it to ensure that people be aware of the security concerns with Facebook and is using the incident to draw people’s attention to the matter. He says that, “Anyone can grab your data. Users click ‘I agree’ or ‘I accept’ and their information goes off to the application developer, who can do whatever they want with it.”
Source: Forbes
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