Recently, there came an uproar over a suggested leak in Facebook, that allegedly exposed the user information of about 100 million users. However, now it turns out that, the supposed “leak” wasn’t exactly a breach of Facebook security protocols, but was in fact something, that has been public for a long time. In fact the so called “leak” was rather a script designed by security researcher, Ron Bowes, who had created this Ruby script in an effort to download information from the user directory of Facebook, which itself is a public tool, that allows users to search the indexed public profile pages.

One of the most known facts about the user directory is that, when a search is conducted, only a user’s partial information is revealed, including names, profile images and a handful of his friends and the directory in no manner provides any sensitive or personal information in the search result. The aim behind the creation of the script was to create a statistical database of the most common names, something, that in no ways create any kind of security threat to the Facebook users.

Via Ars Technica