[atleta]

It's almost what they intended. It was an internal API that they never thought would be exploited. (I.e. used by third parties.) Calling it scraping is a pretty fat lie.

I've just checked. My phone number is in the data set. I've never set my phone number public so no one should have been able to 'scrape' it.

On a side note, I remember learning about this feature, or maybe an earlier incarnation, a few years ago when a friend showed the the profile of a girl he just met at a bar. The girl had a pretty common name so I asked my friend how he looked her up, did they have friends in common. I was really just curious how FB would now which person to show. He said "no, she gave me her number and you can look them up like so and so". (I can't remember whether you could search for the number or had to create a contact, but it's besides the point.)

I was pretty baffled because it was obvious that you could just create a very powerful white pages type of db pretty easily. Which someone apparently did for half a billion people.

This also explains how someone managed to call me from a UK number a few weeks ago trying to sell me some news paper subscription. They said they were from the "Herald digest". And they did know my name (so it wasn't just dialling random numbers.)