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It's actually not super easy to fake a Facebook or LinkedIn presence. Most services that use social media presence as an identity check ask questions like: 1.

by lbarrow 13y ago

It's actually not super easy to fake a Facebook or LinkedIn presence. Most services that use social media presence as an identity check ask questions like: 1. How long has your account been active? 2. Does your account have a human-like pattern of activity? 3. Do your social graphs overlap realistically? Are you Facebook friends with your LinkedIn connections? Etc. It'd take an extremely patient scammer to fake that sort of data. It can be done, of course, it's not trivial.

lessnonymous 13y ago
My "Social Graph" between Facebook and LinkedIn is approximately 2. One is for social networking, the other for professional. So if they think there's any good to come from comparing the two, there's going to be a lot of people like me for whom it Just Doesn't Work.
- roel_v 13y ago
  More likely, there will be a few people like you for whom it Just Doesn't Work. Which is fine, as a company you need to decide on which customers you want to take on, and outliers generally aren't worth the trouble (nothing personal).
  - drharris 13y ago
    No, I think "a lot" is more accurate. I have only 3 crossovers. I do not FB friend my coworkers, and I do not LinkedIn random FB friends. One is social, one is professional, and I think quite a few people use it that way. Not all of us consume social networking like a buffet.
    - roel_v 13y ago
      OK sorry if this reply sounds like I'm nerdraging, it's because I am - don't take it personal, it happens so often here nowadays that sometimes I can't hold it back any more. Can we please please please stop with the 'anecdote of 1 = data' and 'I do it like this and so do my friends (who are self-selected to be as much like me as possible)' arguments. It does not matter what you do, nor does it matter what you think. Businesses have much more data on this than the vast majority of HN readers, and while it's nice to think that they're all stupid in the 'I am so much smarter' sense, it is most likely not true. If Airbnb had, over the course of testing their validation approach against the first let's say 1000 users found out that the majority had little to no overlap in their social graphs between social networks, do you think they would keep using it this way? Clearly the answer is no, which leads to the prima facie conclusion that your generalization of your own behavior to the population at large is flat-out wrong. I'm not saying there is no way it could be that indeed most people have little overlap, just that the evidence we have so far, plus some reasonable thinking, points to the other conclusion. Of course, if you do have (or can point to) data (i.e., not anecdotes, not 'I think', but hard data, obtained in a methodologically sound way) to the contrary, that would be a valuable addition to this discussion. All these "I don't do it like that so it sucks!" replies are just noise, and that was (in a passive-aggressive way) one of the underlying points in my reply.
      - jdbernard 13y ago
        Your argument is based on tenuous reasoning predicated on the assumption that you know how the Airbnb people are thinking and how they intend to use the data. The other argument is based on the assumption that there are probably other people who use Facebook and LinkedIn in a similar fashion (I am another data point). I do not see how your argument carries any more weight than theirs. It certainly fails the hard evidence test you put forth.
mseebach 13y ago
More relevantly, does your friend/connections also connect to other people, and is the graph an "island" or is it securely attached to "the cloud" (a term SixDegrees.com used back in the day to describe the big, central cluster of connections)
jfoster 13y ago
Patient scammer, or a bot which can read captchas and simulate human-like activity and create networks with graphs that overlap realistically. Facebook might catch that a suspicious new community with no previous presence has emerged, though. On the whole I agree with you. Until the bot I described actually exists, social profiles are a pretty good identity check. No reason not to use them whilst they're still worth something.
bradleyjg 13y ago
They don't insist on both logins, so point 3 at least is out. Besides which they have your credit card on file. Why not just match that up with the scanned in driver's licence / passport?
notahacker 13y ago
About a quarter of Facebook friend requests I've received this year are from bots/fakes, mostly with pretty realistic-looking profiles, and I'm sure a fair number of them can be bought by any interested bidder. It stretches credulity to suggest Facebook and LinkedIn are better ID checks than reviews from paying AirBnB users, which is what AirBnB's position seems to be.

by lbarrow 13y ago

lessnonymous 13y ago

My "Social Graph" between Facebook and LinkedIn is approximately 2. One is for social networking, the other for professional. So if they think there's any good to come from comparing the two, there's going to be a lot of people like me for whom it Just Doesn't Work.

roel_v 13y ago
More likely, there will be a few people like you for whom it Just Doesn't Work. Which is fine, as a company you need to decide on which customers you want to take on, and outliers generally aren't worth the trouble (nothing personal).
- drharris 13y ago
  No, I think "a lot" is more accurate. I have only 3 crossovers. I do not FB friend my coworkers, and I do not LinkedIn random FB friends. One is social, one is professional, and I think quite a few people use it that way. Not all of us consume social networking like a buffet.
  - roel_v 13y ago
    OK sorry if this reply sounds like I'm nerdraging, it's because I am - don't take it personal, it happens so often here nowadays that sometimes I can't hold it back any more. Can we please please please stop with the 'anecdote of 1 = data' and 'I do it like this and so do my friends (who are self-selected to be as much like me as possible)' arguments. It does not matter what you do, nor does it matter what you think. Businesses have much more data on this than the vast majority of HN readers, and while it's nice to think that they're all stupid in the 'I am so much smarter' sense, it is most likely not true. If Airbnb had, over the course of testing their validation approach against the first let's say 1000 users found out that the majority had little to no overlap in their social graphs between social networks, do you think they would keep using it this way? Clearly the answer is no, which leads to the prima facie conclusion that your generalization of your own behavior to the population at large is flat-out wrong. I'm not saying there is no way it could be that indeed most people have little overlap, just that the evidence we have so far, plus some reasonable thinking, points to the other conclusion. Of course, if you do have (or can point to) data (i.e., not anecdotes, not 'I think', but hard data, obtained in a methodologically sound way) to the contrary, that would be a valuable addition to this discussion. All these "I don't do it like that so it sucks!" replies are just noise, and that was (in a passive-aggressive way) one of the underlying points in my reply.
    - jdbernard 13y ago
      Your argument is based on tenuous reasoning predicated on the assumption that you know how the Airbnb people are thinking and how they intend to use the data. The other argument is based on the assumption that there are probably other people who use Facebook and LinkedIn in a similar fashion (I am another data point). I do not see how your argument carries any more weight than theirs. It certainly fails the hard evidence test you put forth.

mseebach 13y ago

More relevantly, does your friend/connections also connect to other people, and is the graph an "island" or is it securely attached to "the cloud" (a term SixDegrees.com used back in the day to describe the big, central cluster of connections)

jfoster 13y ago

Patient scammer, or a bot which can read captchas and simulate human-like activity and create networks with graphs that overlap realistically. Facebook might catch that a suspicious new community with no previous presence has emerged, though. On the whole I agree with you. Until the bot I described actually exists, social profiles are a pretty good identity check. No reason not to use them whilst they're still worth something.

bradleyjg 13y ago

They don't insist on both logins, so point 3 at least is out. Besides which they have your credit card on file. Why not just match that up with the scanned in driver's licence / passport?

notahacker 13y ago

About a quarter of Facebook friend requests I've received this year are from bots/fakes, mostly with pretty realistic-looking profiles, and I'm sure a fair number of them can be bought by any interested bidder. It stretches credulity to suggest Facebook and LinkedIn are better ID checks than reviews from paying AirBnB users, which is what AirBnB's position seems to be.