The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is cracking down on a site they say lifted user information to create smear profiles on a for-profit reputation site. The FTC said that the operators of Jerk.com (which appears to have since been taken down) harvested data from millions of Facebook users to create profiles without …

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Wednesday 9th April 2014 08:23 GMT James 51

It was only a matter of time but it's still wrong. Stuff like this is going to have to become a criminal offense before it gets tackled properly but then it will simply be off-shored to somewhere the local authorities (assuming there are any) won’t bother going after them.

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Wednesday 9th April 2014 09:11 GMT Anonymous Coward

Internet is a dangeours place

Leave your name, info and photos on that place with caution.

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Wednesday 9th April 2014 09:38 GMT I ain't Spartacus

Nice security from Facebook there! Oh sure, anyone from a remote location can download 77 million records from our database - including private data. Can't see anything going wrong with that...

Still at least one person can't clear their 'jerk' status however much they pay. Mr John Fanning is the Jerk CEO who's just been hauled before the WTC beak. I like that sentence becasue it's correct in both its meanings. Although his company should really be called Fuckwit to be a more accurate description...

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Wednesday 9th April 2014 11:16 GMT Anonymous Coward

The internet distilled

Content theft, abusing strangers, social networking and money, and nothing else. It's basically the internet boiled down to its bare essentials.

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1. Wednesday 9th April 2014 11:30 GMT JimC
  
  Re: The internet distilled
  
  And at the root of it all, pimping for the advertising dollar... We had such utopian visions for the net back then, where did it all go wrong?
  
  (I suspect in thinking it was a free lunch when the ad exec was paying)
  
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2. Wednesday 9th April 2014 11:58 GMT Swarthy
  
  Re: The internet distilled
  
  But where's the porn? You can't have 'the internet distilled' without the porn.
  
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Wednesday 9th April 2014 14:30 GMT User McUser

Buried the Lead

Jerk.com used fraudulent developer profiles to access user profile data from the Facebook API [...] lifting data from the Facebook profiles of some 75 million people, including children and users who had marked their photos and information as private.

The real story here is that any random "developer" can apparently access all of your Facebook data, even if it is marked as private and you have no relation with said "developer."

Or has this always been the case and I'm just late to the party?

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1. Wednesday 9th April 2014 15:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Buried the Lead
  
  Has always been the case. The facebook API allows for pretty much everything to be retrieved, it is only hidden client side, ie there is the equivalent of a flag in the data marked 'private' which if set, the client is supposed to not display this data. No obligation to do so of course..
  
  Have your profile as private and friends only? Try logging in with facebook somewhere else, you will most likely find your friends names and profiles, which were not supposed to be visible, have been slurped.
  
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Wednesday 9th April 2014 15:10 GMT Anonymous Coward

"Jerk LLC claimed that in 2012 it netted a mere $3,000 in revenues and convinced just 22 people to subscribe to its paid options."

Last time I checked, stuff doesn't stop being bad just because your execution sucked so much you couldn't make any money. Given how easy it is to make a buck if you throw your morals out the window, it doesn't say much for Mr. Fanning that he managed to screw up the former even after doing the latter.

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