LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, offers the information on the Internet site Pirate Bay. The file allows people to perform searches of various different types, has been downloaded by several thousand people.

In short, if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy settings on Facebook, Bowes and those who have the file will still be able to access information that was public when it was compiled.

Furthermore -- people who had set their privacy settings so their names did not appear in Facebook's search system can now be found if they were friends with anyone whose name was searchable!

Bowes says that of the 171 million names of the people on the file those 100 million names were unique.

"As I thought more about it and talked to other people, I realized that this is a scary privacy issue. I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook," he wrote.

"Facebook helpfully informs you that '[a]nyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings' - but that doesn't help much anymore considering I already have them all (and you will too, when you download the torrent). Suckers!"

"Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details," Bowes added. "If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops ."

A privacy expert expressed concern at the implications of Bowes' actions. "Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it," Simon Davies, of campaign group Privacy International told the BBC. "It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence."