Here come the apps for leaking Facebook info. Apparently, you can now export all your friends' information into a CSV file. Not a comforting piece of functionality from a user perspective IMO. This seems to me to be a pretty big security issue. Picked this tidbit up from the comments on TechCrunch:
FriendCSV user: So I just received my FriendCSV and am seeing a number of records that do not exist on my friends list. It appears that there are some data leakage issues here. For instance, I only have 79 friends (I’m a loser) but the CSV contained 145 rows (bonus!). These are not even friends of friends.
FriendCSV developers: ...this very unfortunate glitch has been fixed. Here’s what happened: After valleywag, techmeme, digg, etc. all picked it up, the server got overwhelmed and we had around 25 dumps that were in queue. FB times out after a few minutes, so to speed up with the dump, we added some threading to the libraries, which pushed the exports through in an instant, but also misplaced some of the data in what we now know to be at least four separate csv dumps. When we were alerted to this, we removed the threading and all was right again; however, the error did occur and it was our fault. We’ll continue to test the app during the night just to make sure this doesn’t happen again.Nice to know my personal information is in safe hands.
Leave a comment