Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent

Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested.

Reader Clint discovered that all you had to do is use something like Peer Block, which grabs the IPs of the other users also downloading the torrent and identifies which company or university or organization they belong to. You can check this yourself by hopping on the torrent and doing the same thing.

Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent. A couple caveats to these. Just because a company is on the list, doesn't mean that it's a sanctioned download by the company itself to grab the user information for some purpose. It could easily just be some dude at the company who wanted to download the torrent himself to check it out. Also, the IP addresses assigned to a company might fluctuate (they usually don't, much, unless major companies change their connection to the internet, so it should be mostly accurate).

A.C. Nielsen, Agilent Technologies, Apple, AT&T - Possible Macrovision, Baker & McKenzie, BBC, Bertelsmann Media, Boeing, Church of Scientology, Cisco Systems, Cox Enterprises, Davis Polk & Wardwell, Deutsche Telekom, Disney, Duracell, Ernst & Young, Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, HBO & Company, Hilton Hospitality, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Levi Strauss & Co., Lockheed-Martin Corp, Lucasfilm, Lucent, Lucent Technologies, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Mcafee, MetLife, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Novell, Nvidia, O'Melveny & Myers, Oracle Corp, Pepsi Cola, Procter and Gamble, Random House, Raytheon, Road Runner RRWE, Seagate, Sega, Siemens AG, SONY CORPORATION, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, The Hague, Time Warner Telecom, Turner Broadcasting system, Ubisoft Entertainment, Unisys, United Nations, Univision, USPS, Viacom, Vodafone, Wells Fargo, Xerox PARC

via Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent.

Enjoy all the extra spam you may now get. I quit Facebook six months ago, around January of 2010 and haven't missed it.

I'd agree that this means some employee at each of these large companies is downloading the face book information, not that the company itself is doing so.

Notice, Apple is on the list, but not Microsoft. This may just be an indication that internal network security is better at Microsoft than at Apple.