Sega named in Facebook info leak

By
Ryan Bloom
– July 31, 2010

Sega named in Facebook info leakOne of 65 companies grabbing your data… but for what?

There’s been a lot of ruffled feathers lately regarding how Facebook treats your privacy. By default, the site has you bare all your personal details for the whole world to see. Most recently, that’s come under fire, given the site’s rapid expansion in to letting you do everything through Facebook. Suddenly, everybody knows your secret addiction to Justin Bieber thanks to Pandora, whether you wanted that publicly known or not. And there are hundreds – maybe even thousands of marketing firms out there who would absolutely love to get a peek at that kind of data.

Thanks to a recent Facebook security leak, now it’s easier than ever to mine that kind of data. Hacker group “Skull Security” created a program that went through every publicly-available Facebook profile, pulled all of the data it was allowed to, and wrapped it up in one nice, neat, tidy torrent file, clocking in at around 2.8gb in size. To make a long story a little less long, Gizmodo did some investigating to find out who, exactly, was downloading this data. In the article, they name 65 total major corporations who are grabbing that data – including Pepsi, nVidia, HBO, Disney, and yes, your friend and ours, Sega.

There are, of course, two things to keep in mind: One, all of the information in this 2.8gb torrent is made up of stuff that was already publicly available, and two, as Gizmodo points out:

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.

So what do these companies want with your data? The best case scenario is simply market research. They want to know what you like so they can tailor advertisements to do a better job at selling you stuff. Depending on your views regarding privacy, that can be seen as either a good thing, or a bad thing. If it’s used to sell you something that you really need, that’s good, but I’m sure we’ve all gone to see a movie or bought a videogame because of a misleading advertisement – and that’s when corporations use data like this to appeal to you even when it’s something you don’t actually want.

And though you may breathe a sigh of relief regarding this only being relegated to so-called “public” data, many have taken Facebook to task in recent months over their lax security options. You may be sharing information over Facebook that you don’t want made public, without even realizing it’s available, and the maze of security options provided by the site make ensuring your privacy more difficult than it needs to be.

Which leads to the worst-case scenario for a data leak of this size: access to your email, and identity theft. Obviously, a corporation like Sega might not be in to that sort of illegal activity, but that’s assuming it’s Sega as a corporation and not just some Sega employee wanting to thumb through your personal information.

We’ll keep tabs on Sega’s involvement in this story, and update you further as necessary. In the mean time, it might be a good idea to get new passwords for this kind of stuff, just to be safe.

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