“Well, scientists now know a lot of phone numbers,” the responsible parties might have thought, “So what?” (...) a surprising amount can be read from the data, and for some users, it can be life-threatening. (...)
And then there are several classes of data that can be uncomfortable to life-threatening for users
From further down in the article:
Approximately 30 percent of users have entered something in the “Info” field of their profile, and some reveal a lot: political views, sexual or religious orientation, confessions of drug abuse are found there, as are drug dealers who advertise their product range in this very field.
The easy accessibility of the photos would therefore have allowed the compilation of a database that, through facial recognition, often leads to the phone number and vice versa.
That isn't dystopic at all
Meta classifies the researchers' approach as "scraping" (...) We had already been working on industry-leading anti-scraping systems
Oh, the irony