The debate over the privacy relating to public and private data online has once again been ignited by the release of user details of about a fifth of social networking site, Facebook's total subscribers by a security consultant.

Rob Bowes has made available personal details of about 100 million users of the social networking site, Facebook on the internet and anyone can download the file which is in the form of a torrent.

The file includes a list of Facebook users with respective profile link, user name and unique ID. Mr. Bowes has said that he made the file available on the internet to highlight the security issues on the site.

Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly urged Facebook users to learn to embrace openness. "We decided that these would be the social norms now," he has remarked once.

Regarding the leak, Facebook has said that the there is no private information in the file and the details are already public. The torrent file was uploaded to a popular file sharing website called The Pirate Bay and immediately attracted hundreds of downloads.

Mr. Bowes reportedly conducted this exercise `to help him learn how to break passwords'. This may sound disturbing but he is just a security worker pressing corporations to make their sites safer by exposing vulnerabilities. The real threat may come from those who may use this information for illegal goals.

Mr. Bowes wrote in blog post that he included on the searchable information and has also included the software he used for the collection of data in the torrent file.

Facebook has repeatedly changed its privacy settings over the last one year. It faced severe criticism recently over the changes it made to the privacy settings. Privacy groups and authorities around the world protested the changes and asked the company to protest individual privacy. Facebook then introduced simplified privacy controls to allow users to hide their private information.

Users now decide to embrace `openness' as suggested by Mr. Zuckerberg or still intend to hold on to their information and decide who can access it. Despite the controversy, Facebook has been growing very fast and touched half a billion active users mark. The company will touch one billion users mark next year if it continues to grow at its current pace.