Data on 1.2M Facebook users from 2005 (2011) [use archive.org url in thread]

Come on Facebook, you should be hiding your internal identifiers from third parties. Ideally each consumer of Facebook data should have its own mapping of identifiers to make it more difficult to combine datasets later on.

Re: Data on 1.2M Facebook users from 2005 (2011) [use archive.org url in thread]

#8

Post by compsciphd » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 7:04 PM UTC

richdougherty wrote: post #7

> to my surprise, the dataset included each user’s unique Facebook ID number. Come on Facebook, you should be hiding your internal identifiers from third parties. Ideally each consumer of Facebook data should have its own mapping of identifiers to make it more difficult to combine datasets later on.

considering that for a long time facebook didn't have "usernames" and everyone was identified by a number this doesn't seem strange (especially as my faulty memory might mean that they created usernames post 2005)

Re: Data on 1.2M Facebook users from 2005 (2011) [use archive.org url in thread]

#9

Post by 734786710934 » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

richdougherty wrote: post #7

> to my surprise, the dataset included each user’s unique Facebook ID number. Come on Facebook, you should be hiding your internal identifiers from third parties. Ideally each consumer of Facebook data should have its own mapping of identifiers to make it more difficult to combine datasets later on.

Facebook has restricted apps to only receiving app-scoped IDs since 2014.

Re: Data on 1.2M Facebook users from 2005 (2011) [use archive.org url in thread]

#10

Post by crowbahr » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

compsciphd wrote: post #8

richdougherty wrote: post #7

> to my surprise, the dataset included each user’s unique Facebook ID number. Come on Facebook, you should be hiding your internal identifiers from third parties. Ideally each consumer of Facebook data should have its own mapping of identifiers to make it more difficult to combine datasets later on.

considering that for a long time facebook didn't have "usernames" and everyone was identified by a number this doesn't seem strange (especially as my faulty memory might mean that they created usernames post 2005)

I know they exposed identifiers in friends lists as well, long into 2013 as I recall. I remember hanging out with friends and grabbing the Inspect Source HTML from their little "Friends tile" that had a ranked list of Identifiers that were based off of how much their algorithm thought we were friends. It would display a random selection from the top 50 or so but all 50 were in there and were fairly accurate as to who I interacted with most on Facebook. My friends and I would log them all then compare notes.

I never had any illusions that Facebook wasn't spying on me: I just had illusions that they wouldn't be so stupid as to sell the only thing that makes them valuable in a raw format to customers.

Google at least just sells you targets.