• Epicenter, Wednesday, January 6, 2010 2:55 PM

Thanks to Facebook's recent privacy changes, marketers can now take a list of, say, 1,000 email addresses -- collected legally or illegally -- and glean each email owner's full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level. The "hack," first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through email addresses in their contact list.

Given Facebook's ubiquity and most people's reliance on a single email address, Wired's Epicenter blog says the so-called "harvest" could be quite rich. Indeed, using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of email addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of marketing profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends. Run a few algorithms on that data, adds Epicenter, "and you can start to make inferences about race, income, sexual orientation and interests."

Read the whole story at Epicenter »