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By a design flaw, Facebook exposed it's members' details to everyone. One can easily obtain the names, profile pictures and locations of users who have linked their mobile number to their Facebook account but had chosen not to make it public.
By default, the Who can find me? setting is set to Everyone/public – meaning anyone can find another user by their mobile number. This is the default setting even if that user had chosen to withold their mobile number from their public profile. This loophole would allow hackers to build enormous databases of Facebook users for sale on internet black markets.
Reza Moaiandin, the software engineer who discovered the flaw used a simple algorithm to generate tens of thousands of mobile numbers and sent these numbers to Facebook’s application programming interface (API), a tool that allows developers to build apps linked to the social network. Within minutes, Facebook sent him scores of users’ profiles allowing him to find a Facebook user just by typing their phone number into the social network!!!
Facebook later responded over its privacy policies by switching off the default setting. Anyone joining Facebook from now onwards will only share their posts with friends and family, unless they explicitly choose to make their information open to everyone online, according to a post on the company's blog. The change will not affect its existing 1.28bn account holders, who will be prompted to carry out a "privacy check-up".
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