Yesterday, select Facebook data from over 100 million accounts turned up on a 2.8GB torrent file. It may shock you to know that employees at companies like Sega and Lucasfilm were interested in downloading said information.
Before you become alarmed, the data wasn't a "leak"; all the information was pulled from publicly-available sections of profiles, so you won't find anything listed that you wouldn't find by performing a regular Facebook search.
Still, some people may have accidentally had stuff in the open they wouldn't have wanted. And even then, the information is still valuable to plenty of people; presumably those in the marketing teams of a long list of people downloading the torrent over the past 24 hours, which reveals the origin (via IP) of employees from companies as diverse as Apple, Boeing, Halliburton, IBM, Levi, Pepsi and Xerox.
Or, for companies a little closer to home, there were downloads in offices belonging to Sega, Disney, Sony, Lucasfilm, Viacom and Nvidia.
This doesn't confirm the companies were officially trawling for information at the behest of boards or executives. It just means people who work for those companies were, while at their office, accessing the data. In some cases, then, it may have been out of idle speculation, but yeah, you can bet there'd be plenty more copies being downloaded that were being used to study how to sell you things better.
Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent [Gizmodo]