Facebook has denied that anything untoward has happened to 100 million user accounts after it was claimed that private details of one fifth of the site’s users had been made available in a downloadable file on Pirate Bay.

The file that’s causing a lot of headlines today.

It was widely reported this morning that campaigners who wanted to highlight the “terrifying” privacy policies of Facebook had made the file – which contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profiles, plus their names and unique ID – freely available online. In reality though, nothing of any great magnitude has happened to 20% of the Facebook population at all.

The list itself was ‘leaked’ to the site by Ron Bowles, an online security consultant, who reportedly used a simple piece of code to collect the data from the site. He told the BBC that he published the data to highlight privacy issues.

On Wednesday, the list was rapidly spreading across the internet being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users according to the Beeb. The social networking company has hit back though.

“People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want,” a spokesman said.

“In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook. No private data is available or has been compromised.”

He added: “It is similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook.

“If someone does not want to be found, we also offer a number of controls to enable people not to appear in search on Facebook, in search engines, or share any information with applications.”

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, a campaign group, said: “Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it,” he said.

“It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn’t have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there’s an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence.”

Did they really though? Overall, this sort of feels like a storm in a teacup – a great way for a security expert to get his name out there without doing that much in reality.

Clubbing together a bunch of ‘personal’ details in a file may have taken a little time but thus far there hasn’t been any reports of anything untoward happening to the supposedly private details leaked in the document.

If someone it outraged by all this; just sort your privacy settings out and you’ll be fine.