| By Anonymous,
on 18-12-2007 06:16
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Favoured : 32 |
Published in : The News, Latest News |
As if we needed another reason to be cautious about how much information we post on social networking sites like Facebook, a recent lawsuit over data mining reminds us once again that nothing is entirely private.
Facebook filed a lawsuit earlier this year against a number of anonymous individuals responsible for hitting Facebook's servers hundreds of thousands of times in an effort to scrape information on users of the site. It has since discovered the identities of a handful of those people this month, some of whom are associated with a Canadian company that pays for affiliate referrals to porn sites.
The complaint, originally filed in June in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, says that a certain IP address attempted to access Facebook's system to harvest information between June 1 and 15 of this year. The attempts were unauthorized, says Facebook, and generated error messages. This did not stop the defendants from trying some 200,000 times, though, which caused Facebook to eventually block the IP.
More IP addresses quickly picked up where the old one had left off, however, and Facebook claims that the whole incident has cost the company over $5,000 in order to investigate the matter. By filing discovery requests with the associated ISPs, the company was able to identify a number of individuals associated with the IPs that were pillaging its servers. Brian Fabian, Josh Raskin, and Ming Wu were all fingered by the ISPs, in addition to Istra Holdings, a company responsible for SlickCash.com. Istra Holdings was listed as the owner of one of the IPs in question, and Fabian was listed as the "Manager" contact for that company.
Facebook charges that the defendants—several of whom are still anonymous John Does—violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by recklessly attempting to access Facebook hundreds of thousands of times. They also allegedly violated the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act and breached the Terms of Service set forth by the service that the defendants agreed to upon signing up.
Read full article on ARSTECHNICA
By Jacqui Cheng
December 17, 2007
Last update : 18-12-2007 06:18
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