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I suppose any 15 year old with programming skill can do this. Create an app (kill zombies!) and then when the popularity dies down, sell out your users info to

I suppose any 15 year old with programming skill can do this. Create an app (kill zombies!) and then when the popularity dies down, sell out your users info to the highest bidder. Kinda sensationalist at the end - "DO YOU STILL FEEL SECURE?" Uh yeah, I do. I get hundreds of spam a day that Google puts into a little folder for me to erase. Go ahead and email me, and join that exclusive folder right away. Oh you want to send me a private message on Facebook? Facebook is kind enough to put messages from non-friends in a special folder too, and I never check that. I feel secure.

mandeepj 14y ago
If the sender adds the required headers into his email then it is very likely that google or any other email service provider will not consider the email as spam. Regarding facebook I partially agree with u. Sometimes the message from non-friends goes into other folder and sometimes I can see it in the regular mail folder.
- unreal37 14y ago
  Don't tell the spammers making millions of dollars about that header trick. Seriously though, I don't think a couple of headers will cause an email to become not spam. Google's filter is probably Bayesian, and considers the content of the message, the matching between the originating server and the reply-to address, the spam history of the originating server, any links in the message, how many times it sees the exact same message, how many people mark it as spam, etc. So maybe it will get through to the first few hundred people, and then they'll block it.
- jwegan 14y ago
  Adding the proper headers such as DKIM, SPF, etc., are used to make sure a spammer can't send mail pretending to be someone else. All spam systems still look at the content of the message plus the reputation of the IP/domain when determining if a message should be marked as spam or not.
hkmurakami 14y ago
Do you even need an app for this level of information? I feel like a crawler could look for this information for users with low privacy settings on their accounts by successively going through friends' friends' friends' ... about pages. edit: refuted by Permit's comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4688893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4688893
joe_the_user 14y ago
Sure, the only "security" that "hiding" a Facebook user's information provides is to ... Facebook. They are secure from users switching services and emailing all their friends about it.

mandeepj 14y ago

If the sender adds the required headers into his email then it is very likely that google or any other email service provider will not consider the email as spam. Regarding facebook I partially agree with u. Sometimes the message from non-friends goes into other folder and sometimes I can see it in the regular mail folder.

unreal37 14y ago
Don't tell the spammers making millions of dollars about that header trick. Seriously though, I don't think a couple of headers will cause an email to become not spam. Google's filter is probably Bayesian, and considers the content of the message, the matching between the originating server and the reply-to address, the spam history of the originating server, any links in the message, how many times it sees the exact same message, how many people mark it as spam, etc. So maybe it will get through to the first few hundred people, and then they'll block it.
jwegan 14y ago
Adding the proper headers such as DKIM, SPF, etc., are used to make sure a spammer can't send mail pretending to be someone else. All spam systems still look at the content of the message plus the reputation of the IP/domain when determining if a message should be marked as spam or not.

hkmurakami 14y ago

Do you even need an app for this level of information? I feel like a crawler could look for this information for users with low privacy settings on their accounts by successively going through friends' friends' friends' ... about pages. edit: refuted by Permit's comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4688893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4688893

joe_the_user 14y ago

Sure, the only "security" that "hiding" a Facebook user's information provides is to ... Facebook. They are secure from users switching services and emailing all their friends about it.