Major Corporations Making Use of Compiled Facebook Public Data (AAPL, INTC, CSCO)

Last week, a security researcher indexed and compiled public personal profile information of more than 170 million Facebook users and placed the results on Bit-Torrent for the world to download and major corporations, including Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), and Symantec have all reportedly downloaded the information.

PC World writer Tony Bradley commented about why companies might download the information, “Names and profile data on that many Facebook users is a potential gold mine of valuable marketing data. Facebook is a treasure trove of valuable customer data, and now information from 170 million users is available in a single file on BitTorrent. The scenario reminds me of when I was an IT admin for a dot.com way back when. The philosophy of our CEO was that data is gold–pure and simple. Basically, all data is good data, and even if there isn’t an obvious use for it today, it should be archived because it might prove useful someday.”

Gizmodo first discovered that corporations have been downloading the file after a reader named 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.”

The list of companies which appear to have downloaded the Facebook data includes 55 organizations, which includes Cisco, Intel, Apple and Symantec. The blog post pointed out that “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.”

The data in the BitTorrent file does not contain much personal information, but companies could use it to start to build a database of Facebook customers. The file includes URLs of Facebook profiles which can be analyzed to see if there is any other useful information such as as personal e-mail addresses, geographic location, age, or other valuable data.

Facebook issued a statement explaining “People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want. In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook. Similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook.”