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Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

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Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#21

Post by jp_sc »

keryor wrote: post #12
asmosoinio wrote: post #5

I wanted to test this, but never found a way to activate it... How do you activate this? There is no "how to" text on the project page either (or I didn't find it).

There should be a red link in the top right corner of your facebook page that says "Export friends!" (right to the left of the "Home" link). Once you click that, just follow the accompanying instructions and it should work - although be warned it takes a long time, especially if you're doing it for a lot of "Friends".

It only works when Facebook is in english

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#22

Post by wibblenut »

siculars wrote: post #15
wibblenut wrote: post #2

I'm trying to get all of my friends to use .tel domains. That way they own their data and I can discover all of their URIs dynamically (through DNS) from various apps. It doubles up as a web based "business card", which makes it a slightly easier sell.

This just seems ripe for dns injection tomfoolery.

Just like everything else, hence DNSSEC.

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#23

Post by blhack »

edit: I mis-spoke. You'd need to request the email address from each user individually. Okay, I admit, that is kindof sucky. That said, I completely understand this move. My guess is that this is to prevent "farmville" from dumping a list of all of my friends' emails, and then spamming them.

Isn't this all available via the Open Graph API?

(http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#personalizati...)

Edit: Yes, it absolutely is:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

About halfway down the page, click the link after the word "friends" for a JSON of your friends and their UIDs. Fetch this and iterate through the IDS for basic info.

Fetch this url: https://graph.facebook.com/$facebook_uid

here is my info: https://graph.facebook.com/ryanseamus

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#25

Post by Groxx »

n-named wrote: post #24

Why does this need access to my browsing history? :(

It's a bit of an alarmist, though accurate, alert: anything which has access to your tabs (ie, anything which can observe / inject into a page) also has access to your "history" as it can see what you're browsing. I'm sure other permissions also trip this, but "tabs" is one of the most common, and I ran across it recently too: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html

edit: I'd assume "history" also trips the history alert: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/history.html

edit again: the extension has "tabs" permission only. Very little to worry about, unless you're paranoid about your browsing history.

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#26

Post by natrius »

blhack wrote: post #23

edit: I mis-spoke. You'd need to request the email address from each user individually. Okay, I admit, that is kindof sucky. That said, I completely understand this move. My guess is that this is to prevent "farmville" from dumping a list of all of my friends' emails, and then spamming them. Isn't this all available via the Open Graph API? ( http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#personalizati... ) Edit: Yes,…

Email addresses aren't in there. When I look at my own info, I see a @proxymail.facebook.com email address, which is presumably what an app would use to email me. It's not what you'd want for exporting contact info.

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#27

Post by stoney »

wibblenut wrote: post #2

I'm trying to get all of my friends to use .tel domains. That way they own their data and I can discover all of their URIs dynamically (through DNS) from various apps. It doubles up as a web based "business card", which makes it a slightly easier sell.

This looks very handy - hadn't heard of it before. Apparently it can also be used as an OpenID.

Do you know of a list of services that actually make use of these domains?

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#28

Post by wibblenut »

stoney wrote: post #27
wibblenut wrote: post #2

I'm trying to get all of my friends to use .tel domains. That way they own their data and I can discover all of their URIs dynamically (through DNS) from various apps. It doubles up as a web based "business card", which makes it a slightly easier sell.

This looks very handy - hadn't heard of it before. Apparently it can also be used as an OpenID. Do you know of a list of services that actually make use of these domains?

Yup. Some apps/services are listed here: http://www.telnic.org/tools-landing.html and http://www.telnic.org/tools-other.html

I've written some stuff that I'll try and release soon.

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#29

Post by chrischen »

Groxx wrote: post #25
n-named wrote: post #24

Why does this need access to my browsing history? :(

It's a bit of an alarmist, though accurate, alert: anything which has access to your tabs (ie, anything which can observe / inject into a page) also has access to your "history" as it can see what you're browsing. I'm sure other permissions also trip this, but "tabs" is one of the most common, and I ran across it recently too: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html edit: I'd assume "history" also trips th…

If you are paranoid, use incognito. Extensions are disabled in incognito mode by default.

Re: Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

#30

Post by A1kmm »

w1ntermute wrote: post #20

I would highly recommend against using this tool, as it is against Facebook's Terms of Service. Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook in January 2008 for pulling a stunt exactly like this ( http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-face... ). While his fame and contacts allowed him to get his account reinstated in short order, many of us might not be so fortunate.

I guess the key would be to ensure it is sufficiently slow to avoid triggering the anti-bot mechanism.

Browsing the code I found this: http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-... ... idx * 11000 + Math.random() * 1000

So in other words, it downloads the ith friend at time 11*i +/- 1s; an average of one download every 11.5s might just be sufficiently slow to avoid getting banned from Facebook. Obviously, Facebook could look for patterns in their logs that look like the tool (too high a ratio of friend data downloads to other pages, for example, or an unnaturally high goodness of fit to 11s plus uniform variation), but it would probably be quite expensive for them to make such searches too complex, and if an arms race between the autoblockers and the downloaders ensued, the downloaders would have the upper hand because Facebook has the disadvantages of needing to avoid false positives and to deal with the large amount of data they would need to process to do any complex statistical analysis across all access requests.

A few sources cite the median number of Facebook friends at 150 - so even at the relatively slow rate of one friend data download a minute (perhaps with some intervening decoy requests), half of all Facebook users could download all friend data in 2.5 hours. A non-bot user could easily hit Facebook at that rate, and Facebook would get very bad PR if they started banning a significant proportion of their user base due to false positives.

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