Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested.


Reader Clint discovered that all you had to do is use something like Peer Block, which grabs the IPs of the other users also downloading the torrent and identifies which company or university or organization they belong to. You can check this yourself by hopping on the torrent and doing the same thing.


Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent. A couple caveats to these. Just because a company is on the list, doesn't mean that it's a sanctioned download by the company itself to grab the user information for some purpose. It could easily just be some dude at the company who wanted to download the torrent himself to check it out. Also, the IP addresses assigned to a company might fluctuate (they usually don't, much, unless major companies change their connection to the internet, so it should be mostly accurate).

A.C. Nielsen

Agilent Technologies

Apple

AT&T - Possible Macrovision

Baker & McKenzie

BBC

Bertelsmann Media

Boeing

Church of Scientology

Cisco Systems

Cox Enterprises

Davis Polk & Wardwell

Deutsche Telekom

Disney

Duracell

Ernst & Young

Fujitsu

Goldman Sachs

Halliburton

HBO & Company

Hilton Hospitality

Hitachi

HP

IBM

Intel

Intuit

Levi Strauss & Co.

Lockheed-Martin Corp

Lucasfilm

Lucent

Lucent Technologies

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co

Mcafee

MetLife

Mitsubishi

Motorola

Northrop Grumman

Novell

Nvidia

O'Melveny & Myers

Oracle Corp

Pepsi Cola

Procter and Gamble

Random House

Raytheon

Road Runner RRWE

Seagate

Sega

Siemens AG

SONY CORPORATION

Sprint

Sun Microsystems

Symantec

The Hague

Time Warner Telecom

Turner Broadcasting system

Ubisoft Entertainment

Unisys

United Nations

Univision

USPS

Viacom

Vodafone

Wells Fargo

Xerox PARC

Illustration by Sam Spratt. Check out Sam's portfolio and become a fan of his Facebook Artist's Page.