Every one is well aware of the recent leak of personal information of about 100 million Facebook users. The information was available on The Pirate Bay torrent site with the torrent that was downloaded many times. It was reported by Gizmodo that this personal information of over 100 million people was downloaded by many major companies including Apple, the BBC, IBM, Intel, HP, Nvidia, Sony and even by the Church of Scientology.
Ron Bowes of Skull Security uploaded the torrent initially on The Pirate Bay after collecting the information from Facebook’s open directory. The news of this torrent containing 100 million records of personal information caused stir in the media and added to fears of social networking sites. It was surprising that big corporations who are supposudly advocates of pricavy would actually make an effort to obtain these records.
The names of these companies were tracked back from their ip addresses. Any one downloading a torrent can be tracked back from their ip address and can identify any one else who might have downloaded the information. Using this rule a list of IP addressess was collected that involved numerous big name companies. A way to prevent this was to use a proxy server but these companies failed to do so.
We cannot totally blame the company for the downloads. They could be the work of curious employees of the company rather than the company itself, which we may never know. Companies could sell this data to marketting companies while others could use it internally, regardless of whats done to the data it is clear that the companies care less about privacy of its customers.
Gizmodo identified some of the company
- A.C. Nielsen
- Agilent Technologies
- Apple
- AT&T
- Baker & McKenzie
- BBC
- Bertelsmann Media
- Boeing
- Church of Scientology
- Cisco SystemsCox
- 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
Is is okay to close your facebook account yet?
Haha, the United Nations! Glad to see Microsoft wasn’t in there.
lol yeah for the first time microsoft didnt do someething wrong!! haha
That because MS already has all of this info and much more.
lol MS is soo bent up on trying to defeat the apple ipad it does not know whats going on around it..