← Facebook

2005 MIT academic scraping — 70k profiles

2005 70.0K records affected Share on X

Data compromised

Details not publicly disclosed

Technical writeup

MIT researchers used a script to scrape data from 70,000 profiles across four Ivy League schools. While not a hack, it was the first major demonstration of how Facebook architecture allowed bulk data harvesting.

Root cause

Academic scraping; platform architecture allowed bulk harvesting.

References