171M Facebook users' info published online

LONDON, July 29 (UPI) -- Personal profile information for more than 171 million Facebook users was snatched from the U.S. social-networking Web site and published online.

The public profile information -- data not hidden by users' privacy settings -- was collected by Ron Bowes, a security consultant at Skull Security, who wrote a program that scanned all the listings in Facebook's open-access directory, or about a third of Facebook's 500 million users, and then compiled a text file that lists the information he uncovered.

Skull Security is a hacker group that hunts down security gaps on Web sites.

The file -- downloaded more than 10,000 times from the Pirate Bay file-sharing Web site -- includes users' names, sex, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers and other information.

Bowes said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but a Facebook spokesman pointed out the information was already public.

"No private data is available or has been compromised," spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement e-mailed to United Press International.

"Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details," Bowes wrote in a blog.

"If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture," he continued. "So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops :)"

Simon Davies, founder of the privacy-intrusion watchdog Privacy International in London, told BBC News Facebook "should have anticipated" something like this and "put measures in place to prevent it."

He called on Facebook to change user default settings to "default non-disclosure."

Noyes did not immediately answer two UPI requests seeking comment on this suggestion.

Facebook representatives testified about online privacy Wednesday before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.