This Wired article about lovelorn geeks using their computer skills in an attempt to gain women seemed run-of-the-mill fare until the last three paragraphs:

Moore's buddy Matt Chisholm chimes in to tell me about a similar hack, a JavaScript app he wrote with Moore that works on Friendster. It mines for information about anyone who looks at his profile and clicks through to his Web site. "I get their user ID, email address, age, plus their full name. Neither their full name nor their email is ever supposed to be revealed," he says.

Notified of the security holes Moore and Chisholm exploit, Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists, "We have a policy that we are not being hacked." When I explain that, policy or no, they are being hacked, she says, "Security isn't a priority for us. We're mostly focused on making the site go faster."


I hope that Kopp either mispoke, or has no idea what she is talking about. If Friendster knows about the problem, and is not doing anything to prevent such information leaks, they are in violation of their own privacy policy.

UPDATE: The quote in the article now reads, "Security is a big concern. We haven't seen this problem, though. No complaints about it." Were it not for the Google cache and the other person who blogged about this, I would wonder if I had imagined it all. Since the article appears in the magazine, I assume the current, sane quote is what appears on paper, which raises the question of where the other quote came from.