Man Buys 1 Million Facebook Users’ Personal Information for $5, and Facebook Tries to Cover it Up

Posted by Alcyone _Featured_, Technology Sunday, October 28th, 2012

Anthony Gucciardi | NaturalSociety

How much is your personal information worth? How about a data set consisting of over 1 million individual’s personal information complete with their full legal name, personal E-mail address, and URL to their Facebook account as confirmation? According to one ‘mystery’ company that recently sold 1 million Facebook users’ personal information to a very surprised blogger, not very much at all. About $5, to be specific.

It all started when one blogger, a self-proclaimed seeker of ‘cheap’ deals that pertain to potentially useful or interesting subjects, stumbled across an offer for ’1 million Facebook accounts’ for $5. Skeptical but willing to try it out, the blogger purchased the list to be met with much surprise when he actually personally identified many of the users on the list to be people he actually knew personally. Complete with their personal E-mail address (which Facebook is supposed to keep ‘hidden’), full names, and a link to their page to verify, this blogger had stumbled across a major corporation’s dream come true.

According to the description from the seller of the list, the information was collected through Facebook applications and even checked monthly to ensure validity. The description stated:

“The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe… The list is checked and validated once a month so you won’t get a list full of invalid or duplicate email addresses… this list has a great potential for you.”

facebookuserdata Man Buys 1 Million Facebook Users Personal Information for $5

After purchasing the list and being amazed at its legitimacy, the IT blogger posted an entry detailing the event along with screenshots and a surprising follow-up. Using his personal E-mail provided when signing up for his Facebook account, Facebook’s ‘policy’ team member sent him an E-mail asking him to set up a call with the company. During the call, things got very concerning.

Facebook Rep: Send Us the File, Delete it, And Tell No One

Starting off with a warning to the blogger that the phone call was being recorded, the unnamed Facebook rep told the blogger to send them the file of the 1 million users’ information, delete it, and delete all traces of its mentioning off of his blog.

Not agreeing to censor the information, the blogger posted the quote from the phone conversation on his website:

“Now we would like you to send us this file, delete it, tell us if you have given a copy of it to someone, give us the website from which you bought it including all transactions with it and the payment system and remove a couple of things from your blog. Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation; it is a secret that we are even having this conversation”.

Proceeding to ask whether or not the rep would fill him in on what would be done by the company, the rep said that it was an internal issue and that he would not be allowed to know the result.