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.

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.

Facebook is branching out similar to what Google did 10 years ago. Once Google estabilished itself as the place to go for search queries, it made available it’s search box which developers could place on their own sites, it created an advertisment system where by users could place ads on their websites and gain revenue for themselves, it partnered with browsers to include toolbar search tools.

Facebook has come together with a number of different parties to create a new web standard whereby the ease at which information sharing across not just Facebook but also with dozens of other social networking sites.  For example, similar to share buttons you see on websites, Facebook will introduce a universal “like” button which will allow friends to experience other websites similar to the way they experience certain posts, news links on Facebook itself. The share button allows the user to post a link onto their own Facebook page which their friends can view. Now Facebook can keep track of the websites, news from external sites through the “Like” link.  They are branching outwards instead of providing the ability of sharing information inwards.

We will see more and more sites offering the ability to chat and interact with your Facebook friends without leaving the site you have accessed. The use of External Facebook APIs integrated into existing websites allows the ease in which you can talk with your friends.  At some stage, we should see a Facebook toolbar for integration into all the major browsers.