If you haven’t heard, some guy figured out he could write a script to crawl through Facebook’s profile directory and save the data all in one file. He then turned that file (with over 100 million entries) into a torrent which is currently being downloaded en masse.

Of course some people started freaking out about it. OH GOD ALL THAT PERSONAL DATA IS BEING STOLEN AND HARVESTED OH NOEZ! Some people apparently think their accounts were hacked or compromised or whatever.

Except this guy didn’t do anything illegal. All that data was already publicly available. It just wasn’t very readily accessible – Facebook’s directory is hundreds of nested pages deep (select a letter, then a range of names, then another range of names, and so on), so finding a particular person would take some time. All he did was make it more easily available in a single file rather than buried. But apparently that’s enough to freak people out.

It has been proven time and again that the more a bad guy knows about you the greater your security risk is.

– The Facebook Data Torrent Debacle: Q&A from PCWorld.com

Wow. That’s some really stellar journalism there, PC World. Thanks for the enlightenment.

People. If you don’t want your data “stolen” by people, don’t put it on the Internet.

That said, I’m probably going to try downloading this torrent tonight (with several thousand seeders it shouldn’t take long) just out of curiosity. I didn’t see my name in the profile directory to begin with, so it doesn’t really matter (this file only has about 20% of the entire Facebook user base anyway).