The man behind collecting and publishing the personal details of 100m Facebook users, Ron Bowes through BBC news has come out publicly about his reasons for doing such act.
A security consultant, Bowes used a code to scan the profiles of the affected individuals. However, he expressed that the only data he was able to acquire were the ones not hidden by the privacy setting of the user. Presently, everything that has been discovered by Bowes is already accessible online.
Furthermore, he also remarked that the list was made as part of his work, not for personal gain because he works as a developer for the Nmap Security Scanner and that the compiled data which he compared to a telephone directory will be used in one of their recent tools, Nrack.
The concept behind is for him to check out the most used passwords to be able to employ testing of security sites; thereby, warning companies that there are ways for the systems to be hacked out of good and bad faith.
Bowes, by downloading the information from Facebook was able to come up with common usernames which he eventually named: jsmith, ssmith and skhan. As of the moment, these and other data are available throughout internet.
Facebook, a social networking site since its inception in 2004 has been plagued several times about the very complicated privacy settings.
