Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2012. It reports news from the week of 27 October 2012: Facebook’s third-quarter results and the 20% jump in its shares at the open, Paul Ceglia’s arrest, and Bogomil Shopov’s purchase of the profile list.
Facebook made the news three times over this week. First, it presented its quarterly results, with lower net profit, but it managed to show investors that it can generate growth through its weak spot, the mobile advertising market. That sent its shares up 20% at the open.
Second, the social network has finally shed an added worry, now that the authorities have arrested Paul Ceglia for fraud. Ceglia was claiming 50% of Facebook, saying he had emails exchanged with Mark Zuckerberg proving that Zuckerberg himself had promised him half of the social network in exchange for helping him in its early days. In the end, it has been shown that he submitted fake emails, and he faces a 20-year prison sentence for fraud. Even so, the troubles keep piling up for Facebook, which has been unable to silence the blogger Bogomil Shopov. He says he bought a database of more than 1 million Facebook profiles for just 5 dollars.
At first, nobody believed this “rumour”, since practically no agency on the market sells a database at such a low price. But after he published the database he bought from an intermediary, the profiles were confirmed to be genuine. They belong to active Facebook users in the United States, Canada and Europe, with their first names, surnames, profiles and email addresses.
That is clearly a sweet treat for anyone wanting to send advertising to all those email addresses. With the profiles (interests, hobbies, city and so on), you can run perfectly targeted advertising.
According to the newspaper El Mundo, Facebook contacted the blogger and asked him not to make the data purchase public, as it could hamper an internal investigation the company was carrying out. Although Facebook will have taken action by now, the ad offering that million profiles for sale has been preserved in Google’s cache.
Honestly, I don’t believe Facebook sold that data, if only because of the ridiculous price. But if Facebook didn’t sell the data, the situation is much worse, because it shows how serious the data protection problem is: some agency has got hold of a powerful database, which it sells at 0.000005 dollars per real user. That is what it costs to hand our first name, surname, tastes, hobbies and email address to a person or agency, usually for advertising purposes.
Featured image: Intel Free Press, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
