The end user shouldn’t assume such solutions are in use when they post to any selected site they are registered to

In response to the news that Facebook believes most of its users could have had their public profile scraped, Koby Kilimnik, security research specialist at Imperva, said: “Mark Zuckerberg is right, any publicly available information is exactly that - public.

"Anyone sharing information on the Internet should assume that other people will eventually copy, download and distribute it at will. This goes for photos, phone numbers, emails or even opinions on which dressing is best on a salad.

"There are mitigations that can be offered against scrapers, but the end user shouldn’t assume such solutions are in use when they post to any selected site they are registered to.

"Even if your data isn’t fully public on Facebook and other social media, your friends and connections can make it public if they so choose to by simply copying it to the public domain. That doesn’t mean that we can’t share, but we should understand the ramifications of the act in full and inform others so they would be able to decide on their own what they want to do with their private data."