Public personal details of 100m Facebook users have been collected and published on the net by a security consultant.
The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.
The dat was published to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information. On the Pirate Bay, the world’s biggest file-sharing website, the list was being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users.

One user, going by the name of lusifer69, described the list as “awesome and a little terrifying”.

In a statement, Facebook said that the information in the list was already freely available online.

“People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want,” the statement read.

“In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook.

“No private data is available or has been compromised,” the statement added.

Mr Davies said that the trawl of data fed into “the confusion of the privacy settings”.

“People who do not understand the privacy settings for their Facebook account are likely to have their information on this list.

Facebook has a default setting for privacy that makes some user information publicly available. People have to make a conscious choice to opt-out of the defaults.

Google is bringing Android software development to the masses.

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), has been under development for a year.

The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.

The project is a further sign that Google is betting that its strategy of opening up its technology to all kinds of developers will eventually give it the upper hand in the smartphone software market. Its leading rival, Apple, takes a more tightly managed approach to application development for the iPhone, controlling the software and vetting the programs available.

The Google application tool for Android enables people to drag and drop blocks of code — shown as graphic images and representing different smartphone capabilities— and put them together, similar to snapping together Lego blocks. The result is an application on that person’s smartphone.

The Google tool  works only for phones running Android software. A sign-up with a Google Gmail account is required. The tool is Web-based except for a small software download that automatically syncs the programs created on a personal computer, connected to the application inventor Web site, with an Android smartphone. When making programs, the phone must be connected to a computer with a U.S.B. link.

NEW PRIVACY settings are to be rolled out to Facebook users in days and weeks to come as the social networking giant works to regain trust among its 400 million-plus users over its privacy policy. Users will be notified, within a number of weeks, of the changes with a posting at the top of their profile pages.