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Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
- stfu 15y agoKinda obvious that Facebook is getting scraped up and down for all sorts of reasons. Wasn't there some "art" project of some guy guy who recently scraped millions of (public) profiles? "used programming interfaces from ihearthquotes.com" seems to be down/unknown the the googles?
- phillmv 15y ago>Wasn't there some "art" project of some guy guy who recently scraped millions of (public) profiles? Oh, it's amazing - http://openbook.org/ http://openbook.org/
- jaredsohn 15y agoI think the grandparent post may have been thinking of this: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/223241 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/223241 ('Dating' Site Imports 250,000 Facebook Profiles, Without Permission) For the site linked in the parent post, it looks like the site uses the Facebook Graph API search function for public posts and then makes additional queries to show information about the creator of each post. Since you don't need a Facebook account to use it, I suspect they are making the queries via the server. They might be accumulating the profile photo data as they retrieve it, but it doesn't look any different than any other site that uses the server-side Facebook APIs.
- ianferrel 15y agoIt's a typo: iheartquotes.com is up.
- rwolf 15y agoOne major problem is that Facebook's privacy model for a long time was "trusted with everything"/"trusted with little", and the criteria for entering the inner circle was "the user adds you as a friend." Combine this will social pressure to reciprocate friend requests, and you have a mess. I wonder what effect allowing assymmetric contacts will have. Will users get used to people "subscribing" to them without reciprocating, or will we all try to achieve the ultimate high score by "friending" everyone we can get ahold of?
- JBiserkov 15y ago"Within two weeks, 976, or about 19 percent of the requests, were accepted. Of the 3,517 users who received the second round of requests, 2,079, or about 59 percent, accepted." It seems to me that either people are really indiscriminate in who they accept as their 'friends', or the 'randomly selected "people"' were actually other socio bots :-D
- kleiba 15y agoOr people are more likely to accept a friend request when you already share a common friend on FB.
- brc 15y agoI'm guessing the profile pictures of the 'friends' weren't ugly people.
- derrida 15y agoFunny how those stereotypical 'beautiful' pictures found on the internet are usually ugly.
- pmjordan 15y agoI'm sure that's no accident. I suspect they're at the empirically determined sweet spot between 'beautiful/sexy' and 'loose/easy' for the maximum number of people to feel they'd both stand a chance with the person and actually would want to have sex with them.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI actually got one of these requests and reported it as a scam. One of the reasons I knew it was a scam was because the facebook picture came from one of the stockphoto websites.
- rorrr 15y agoMost of my FB contacts are "friend collectors", they would accept any request. Most of them have 1000+ "friends". I have no clue how they can even remember that many people, let alone have meaningful relationships. I delete contacts that don't post anything interesting after my list grows beyond 50.
- georgieporgie 15y agoIs that stealing? Not to get into a "data wants to be free thing", it just seems like the automatic scraping of (effectively) public information, by an algorithm which can't be held to terms of use.
- windsurfer 15y agoI don't think it's stealing, but it's certainly rude.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoIt's automated social engineering.
- lookelsewhere 15y agoWhat if people begin to sell the data that they have gathered. Would it be illegal then?
- zitterbewegung 15y agoIt makes you wonder what private data sources actually have of the facebook graph (Not including facebook). Does someone have the whole facebook social graph downloaded or a large portion?
- pork 15y agoAt 500+ mil users with an average of 150 connections, you're looking at 500,000,000 * 150 / 2 = 3.75e10 edges. Assuming generously that each edge can be stored with a 4 byte unsigned int, you're looking at about 140 GB. I haven't seen any scrapes that even come CLOSE to that, an that's ignoring throttling and privacy controls. Edit: more likely, you'd get the data as (id1, id2) pairs with 8 byte longs for each id. That's about 600 GB.
- inconditus 15y agoThis is an ignorant question, but do apps have access to the social graph? If so, I'd assume the top game applications have a substantial portion.
- jplewicke 15y agoYou can get names and Facebook IDs of user's friends for anyone who signs in with your app. I don't believe you can fetch their friends through the API, so the game companies should have access to only edges in which one person uses a game.
- jprobert 15y agoThe only way possible to download the whole FB social graph is to get permission to do so from every FB user. People can scrape public info but the social graph allows access to a users friends, friends of friends, likes, comments, checkins an so forth.
- kellyreid 15y agoInternet users opt in to providing their personal details on the internet and then knowingly accept connections from unknown parties, upset about "privacy breaches". This, and more on News at 11.
- brainfed 15y agoMost people who'd be willing to accept random friend requests on Facebook probably have no idea that this even happened.
- DevX101 15y agoIf anyone from Facebook is reading...You guys should add a "Do you know this person?" option to friend requests received from new accounts. If the amount of negative responses to the question surpass some threshold you flag the sending account as suspicious.
- zach 15y agoThere is already an "I don't know this person" option when declining friend requests as far as I've seen.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago> You guys should add a "Do you know this person?" option to friend requests received from new accounts. As long as the profile is a young attractive lady, that option will rarely be chosen.
- Sniffnoy 15y agoWhat Facebook does is to discourage people from adding people they don't know in the first place; evidently this hasn't worked. One interesting thing they used to do but don't anymore: back when they kept track of where people knew each other from, the dialog box for adding someone as a friend would ask where you knew them from, with a whole bunch of checkboxes. One was "I don't know them"; checking this would, rather than displaying boxes so you could enter more details, instead display the message "Then why are you adding them?", and change the "add friend" button to a cancel button. (I may have the exact details wrong there.)
- ricardobeat 15y ago"Steal" is stretched thin here. People made their information public.
- yaix 15y agoI do not see any problem here. > [...] much of it configured to be available only to people on the user's list of friends. And it was. People randomly accept friends and then have their data configured to be shared with them. In this case, the problem was not Facebook but was sitting in front of the computer.
- nostromo 15y agoI suppose it's a bit of a bigger problem than that since a lot of information on Facebook is shared with friends of friends. Because of this it's not just a problem for the bad user (like my aunt on FB), but also all of their connections (like me and 300 other people).
- yaix 15y agoTrue. But still, you can just set your privacy options to only share this stuff with first-level friends. The real problem with Facebook is that they collect data about you, without you being able to control that data. Everything that people have in their smartphones about you, or that other people add about you on Facebook by other means (uploaded email address books, etc) is agregated into "your" profile, even if you don't actually have a profile on Facebook.
- dendory 15y agoFacebook is just a huge mess, really. The other day I was amazed at one particular scam that was so obvious, I decided to investigate. Someone made a page that promised a free iPhone 5 (even though there is no such thing) and had sent over 800,000 invites to people in 3 days. Over 20% answered, liked the page, and entered an email address in a form (as the fan page instructed). The wall was filled with comments like "I hope I win!" and such. There was even some people commenting on the fact that there is no such thing as an iPhone 5, and in every case the answer from other users was basically "who cares? what do we have to lose? it might be true" Moral of the story? There's enough gullible people on Facebook for scammers to make money, regardless what measure Facebook puts in place.
- endlessvoid94 15y agoNewsflash: There are enough gullible people EVERYWHERE for these things to work. This is not a new thing.
- megablast 15y agoBut now, we have one place to go to meet them all. People on craigslist are wary, otherwise it is not easy to get a group of gullible people all in one place.
- endlessvoid94 15y agoThere is literally an advertising industry with this fact at its foundation.
- tomjen3 15y agoIt is better than that though. You see you now not only have a list email addresses. You have a list of email addresses of gullible people. Pretty smart if you ask me.
- yread 15y agoWhat was the quote again? "Nobody ever lost money by overestimating the stupidity." There's also plenty of people who "like" pages because somebody put a transparent like button over them.
- jonmc12 15y agoAny estimate of the number of bots posing as people on facebook? Any way it could be like 100 million? Can facebook could prove or disprove either way? Seems both advertising prices and their valuation are linked to this number, I'm curious what kind of due diligence has been done if social bots are as easy as article makes it sound.
- joe_the_user 15y agoThis might sound harsh but... Who care? How long are people going to keep believing that information you share with people who share with other random people is ... "private"? I've friended spam-bots entirely for shits giggles. Seriously. I like Facebook a lot. Seriously. I'm there pseudo-nonymously but constantly. But naturally I post nothing I don't want totally public 'cause nothing on Facebook is private to start with. Define "privacy" in the context of Facebook. You can't and that's the point.
- jhuni 15y agoI am going to delete my facebook account this November 5. I encourage others to do the same.
- hybrid11 15y agoAnother way to do this is just to use the search method that's part of the Facebook Graph API (replace watermelon in the URL with your query) - https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=watermelon&type=post https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=watermelon&type=post You'd be surprised the amount of information that people post publicly.
- Achshar 15y agowow, THIS is interesting.. and this is like 750 million people's posts :O