Journalist Arrested Over Facebook Privacy Story

Australian tech journalist Ben Grubb was arrested after the Sydney Morning Herald published a piece he wrote about Facebook’s privacy controls.

Grubb was subsequently released without charge and without his iPad, which the police retained. The piece, entitled "Security experts go to war: wife targeted," covers a presentation at an IT security conference where the presenter exposed Facebook’s privacy vulnerabilities by hacking, live, into another security expert’s wife’s Facebook page, displaying photos she had locked behind a ‘Friends only’ privacy setting. Police authorities said they arrested Grubb in connection to a complaint by a Facebook user whose information had been accessed without permission. Executives from The Sydney Morning Herald’s publisher Fairfax said Grubb was simply reporting on a presentation from a conference and had nothing to do with any security breach personally.