According to the latest media reports, personal profile information for more than 171 million Facebook users was snatched from the U. S. social-networking Web site and published online.

It has been reported that the public profile information, data not hidden by users' privacy settings, was collected by Ron Bowes, a security consultant at Skull Security, who wrote a program that scanned all the listings in Facebook's open-access directory, or about a third of Facebook's 500 million users, and then compiled a text file that lists the information he uncovered.

Skull Security is a hacker group that hunts down security gaps on Web sites.

Downloaded more than 10,000 times from the Pirate Bay file-sharing Web site, the file includes users' names, sex, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers and other information.

He published the data to highlight privacy issues, but a Facebook spokesman pointed out the information was already public, Bowes has said.

Spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement e-mailed to United Press International, "No private data is available or has been compromised."

Bowes wrote in a blog, "Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details. If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture," he continued. "So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops :)"

Facebook "should have anticipated" something like this and "put measures in place to prevent it," Simon Davies, founder of the privacy-intrusion watchdog Privacy International in London, told BBC News.

It was further reported that he called on Facebook to change user default settings to "default non-disclosure." (With Inputs from Agencies)