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Comment by timdaub | Hacker News Reader

Great, and while you can get sued into oblivion for downloading a Metallica album, all our personal data is downloadable from a public website for 3€.

Like for real, it took me 2mins to find the leak myself...

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Where did you get the data leak, I want to check too.

https://t.me/freedomf0x/12553

I haven't checked the content myself, but this tg channel is usually legit

Thanks. Was just able to verify I'm not affected (deleted my acc years ago), but it's crazy how many of my friends' names plus phone number are on there.

Thanks. I'm just getting a "Please open Telegram to view this post from @freedomf0x" message. Any way to access this without signing up for Telegram? The irony of giving my personal info to another 3rd party just to check if my personal info was leaked by a different party is too much...

Yeah I assume that the data is not actually hosted in Telegram so would be really nice with a direct link or magnet or similar.

There's no reason it can't be. Telegram limits individual files to 2GB but offers unlimited storage besides that.

the telegram has a text file with links to links by country, I've just stuck that at https://pastebin.com/3SvG1FJ0

Goes without saying, do not use the link above. Downloads malware.

Which link? The ufiles? Why does it go without saying? Not like stuff is instantly executed by downloading. All I got for my selected country was a plain text file.

What are you talking about? All the ufile links are just text files

Is there an alternative to ufile?

I've tried three different browsers and none can get the download to work. It's possible I'm blocking some tracking domain at the router-level that's integral to the download functioning.

Edit: Turns out I was blocking Google's captcha.

I was wondering this too, as ufile is really slow.

Someone needs to torrent all these files.

could you post it again? the pastebin page got deleted

I doubt you'll find it anywhere else, it probably gets removed anywhere it gets posted due to violation of terms of service. I created a Telegram account and the Telegram link still works. I think that's your best bet.

And since that got taken down, here's a skylink:

https://siasky.net/AAC7DeBiGWL-QbG0cEFpCwuEiRlmrNLu7FdOUrF3t...

And a couple other Sia portals it's available through:

https://skyportal.xyz/AAC7DeBiGWL-QbG0cEFpCwuEiRlmrNLu7FdOUr... https://skydrain.net/AAC7DeBiGWL-QbG0cEFpCwuEiRlmrNLu7FdOUrF...

Were there any leaks of Australian data? I can only see Austria in pastebin (spelling mangled as Austriaia)

Raidforums (where this list is originally from) also only has the Austrian data and no Australian data.

The file Austriaia.zip is data about Austria NOT Australia.

Speaking of Australia, who feels like handing over their driving license or passport to continue using the site?

https://www.perthnow.com.au/technology/internet/federal-gove...

So far it doesn't seem to be clear but to me it appears Australia so far isn't as widely distributed.

Earlier, it appeared Troy Hunt was sent both Australia and Austria:

https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1378481134086971394

https://gist.github.com/troyhunt/00b9aa28d486c9b81f18259fa80...

~196 MB vs ~34 MB respectively.

However, he later posted an update later expressing some similar curiosities:

https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1378938375881682946

https://gist.github.com/troyhunt/9a081cea0de6cbc63d93ebc0104...

The second gist is the one showing "Austriaia" (Austria, not Australia) and ~35 MB.

I checked Telegram and they had a facebook.txt 3.6K file that won't download. Did they nerf it? I can't find the real file as I don't read Russian.

Edit: Nevermind I found the pastebin below.

Seems like all German accounts with 8-digit phone numbers are missing. Only 7-digit number accounts are shown.

From the initial tweet the source is this:

https://raidforums.com/Thread-SELLING-Free-FaceBook-533M-rec...

However, the comments in that forum suggest that it's not "free" and/or not there.

OT: Failed their hCaptcha probably 10-15 times before I gave up and just closed the tab. Hadn't seen it in the wild yet; I'm glad it's not pervasive (yet).

for me Google's captcha is much harder to solve then hCaptcha...

You might give this a look. It's a FOSS browser extension that auto-solves google captchas by switching them to sight-impaired mode and using speech recognition.

https://github.com/dessant/buster

Can you link it? I'd like to check if I am affected.

Regrettably, I was forced to create a FB account for work.

At this point i don't see why only facebook and the thieves should have access to this data. If the data is public it loses its value

Why would the data being public stop robo-callers from using the list?

What about this data being public causes it to lose value? It seems like it would be a boon for lots of companies even if every other company has it.

I believe they mean it can't effectively be sold if everyone has it. It loses value as a commodity if anyone can access it, but the value of the data is still in tact.

But facebook is not in the business of selling your data. It's in the business of selling your attention and it uses data to do so. There's nothing about this leak that changes Facebook's position in this market in this regard.

> But facebook is not in the business of selling your data.

There are an awful lot of arguments against this stance and the argument supporting the claim appear to split hairs in a very convenient manner.

I can’t find any Facebook resource that says I can buy data, or any other reputable source that reports Facebook is selling details about people. Can you provide any?

https://theatlantic.com/article/578599/

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/facebook-d...

This one is interesting and refutes the argument you are making

“When the company argues that it is not selling data, but rather selling targeted advertising, it’s luring you into a semantic trap, encouraging you to imagine that the only way of selling data is to send advertisers a file filled with user information. Congress may have fallen for this trap set up by Mr. Zuckerberg, but that doesn’t mean you have to. The fact that your data is not disclosed in an Excel spreadsheet but through a click on a targeted ad is irrelevant. Data still changes hands and goes to the advertiser.”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/14/18140146/does-facebook-s...

It’s in reaction to this below link in the NYT which is also interesting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/facebook-data-pri...

I argue that FB makes money by collecting data, then selling it. What’s the opposing view?

There’s no trap. We’re simply using different definitions of “data” or “personal data”.

The opposing view is that the leaked data is only valid up to the time of the leak, and there is no guarantee it doesn't go stale, while Facebook has the fresh data.

Value to whom?

The only way the data can lose value is when everyone in the list change their numbers. If making it public drives them to do that, then good, but the inertia to do that is so big that I doubt most would. Spammers and marketers don't care if the list is being used by competitors, so the value of the data as spam target is also not reduced by making it public.

Source?

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