Tag Archive for: scraped

48 million people put at risk after firm that scraped info from social networks left it exposed for anyone to download

48 million people put at risk after firm that scraped info from social networks left it exposed for anyone to download

Chances are that you’ve never heard of Washington-based data firm LocalBlox. But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t heard of you. And it doesn’t mean that your personal information hasn’t been recklessly exposed through their sloppy disregard for the most basic security.

Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.

Graham Cluley

Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones [Updated]

Enlarge / This screen in the Messenger application offers to conveniently track all your calls and messages. But Facebook was already doing this surreptitiously on some Android devices until October 2017, exploiting the way an older Android API handled permissions. (credit: Facebook)

[Update, March 25, 2018, 20:24 Eastern Time]: Facebook has responded to this and other reports regarding the collection of call and SMS data with a blog post that denies Facebook collected call data surreptitiously. The company also writes that it never sells the data and that users are in control of the data uploaded to Facebook. This “fact check” contradicts several details Ars found in analysis of Facebook data downloads and testimony from users who provided the data. More on the Facebook response is appended to the end of the original article below.

This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years’ worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.

This experience has been shared by a number of other Facebook users who spoke with Ars, as well as independently by us—my own Facebook data archive, I found, contained call-log data for a certain Android device I used in 2015 and 2016, along with SMS and MMS message metadata.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Dataset of scraped Tinder pics poof from Kaggle after Tinder complains

Tinder was ticked after 40,000 profile photos were scraped to create the People of Tinder dataset, accused the person behind the script of violating its terms of service, and asked Kaggle to remove the dataset from the platform. Nevertheless, it was downloaded hundreds of time before the take-down which now results in a 404 error.

The People of Tinder dataset was created by Stuart Colianni; it consisted of 40,000 images from Tinder users in the San Francisco Bay Area – half were of women and half were of men. He intends to use the dataset with Google’s TensorFlow’s Inception to create a neural network capable of distinguishing between male and female images.

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Network World Security