A hacker has exploited Facebook’s Graph Search to collect a database of thousands of phone numbers and Facebook users. Both parties agree that all the information was left public by users (even if the users themselves may still not realize it). But Facebook issued him a cease and desist after the hacker continued to scrape data and argued with Facebook that the availability of the information invades users’ privacy. Brandon Copley, a mobile developer in Dallas, Texas, searched and downloaded 2.5 million entries of phone numbers from the social network. He says many of these entries are empty, as they either aren’t active numbers or aren’t connected to a Facebook user with public settings; however, he notes that thousands of entries do match a phone number with the name of a Facebook user.
