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Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

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Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#71

Post by SethMurphy »

cs702 wrote: post #13

Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person. Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!

The price is not low because of supply and demand, but because it is not a very useful list. When you pay a lot for a list it is because it has been curated and you are buying a list with X user having Y attribute[s]. Y='Facebook user' here, that is hardly worth anything. The network is too large for it to be significant for any real marketing campaign. Essentially you have a list of 1,000,000 VERY loosely related users.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#72

Post by TylerE »

notatoad wrote: post #68
cs702 wrote: post #13

Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person. Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!

>Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand I don't think that rule applies for digital goods where the cost of reproduction is zero. The supply is infinite.

Nitpick: Cost per unit of digital goods is low, but not zero. Servers, bandwidth, CC fees, sysadmins, etc.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#73

Post by driverdan »

This is one of the reasons why I don't use FB apps. The privacy and security controls are far too loose and broad. It's never clear exactly how your data will be used.

One of my clients has a FB app so work with this stuff daily. It's so easy to build a full profile of of an active user's life, their interests, their friends, their work and education history. Their geotagged photos and check-ins tell you exactly where they like to go. Pure gold for marketers / spammers.

The information is just too accessible and valuable for people to not abuse it.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#74

Post by stef25 »

cake wrote: post #48
mapleoin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get a list of 1 million valid emails?

You just crawl the web. I am not surprised either by this, I don't consider emails and first/last name as private data.

FB emails are probably a bit "fresher" than ones found by randomly crawling the web.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#75

Post by fghh45sdfhr3 »

Permit wrote: post #70
Achshar wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should I expect?

They're pretty clever. When I started programming in 2009, I wrote a small scraper that would create accounts, friend people and steal their info if they accepted. (I never released it past my own friends list and never sold the data). There were the obvious checks for CAPTCHAs when too much activity was detected, but other subtleties as well. If you looked at too many people's profiles, emails wouldn't be displayed…

Soon we'll have very clever, slow going, open source Facebook scrapers, created for free just because we love a challenge.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#76

Post by [deleted] »

jklio wrote: post #51
brianbreslin wrote: post #25

Excuse my naïveté, but what could one use this list for? Aside from spam email blast?

The OED confirms naivety is also an English word that's been around since at least the 1700s. I am not implying naïveté is wrong in English, just that there is a simpler option should you so choose.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#77

Post by hkmurakami »

tvladeck wrote: post #66
rmc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your implication is that Facebook themselves sold this data. The orignial article says that it was from apps that people isntalled from a 3rd party, not Facebook.

Doesn't matter. The company that got the data then sold it on for $5, which gives us an indication of how much they had to pay [1] to get the data from FB in the first place. [1] I'm using "pay" loosely here. I have no idea what they had to give up or produce in order to get the data, but presumably FB received something of value.

I imagine this data came from the "allow this app to access XYZ of your information: YES/NO" thingy that pops up when authorizing apps on these social media platforms. The only payment to FB that I can think of would be in the form of marketing costs (or does FB have a developer membership cost like Apple?)

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#78

Post by hkmurakami »

SethMurphy wrote: post #71
cs702 wrote: post #13

Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person. Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!

The price is not low because of supply and demand, but because it is not a very useful list. When you pay a lot for a list it is because it has been curated and you are buying a list with X user having Y attribute[s]. Y='Facebook user' here, that is hardly worth anything. The network is too large for it to be significant for any real marketing campaign. Essentially you have a list of 1,000,000 VERY loosely related us…

I was considering the possibility of selling these emails to a spam email list, but then realized that since so many accounts' email addresses were changed to FOO@facebook.com, the value of these 1MM facebook accounts has diminished rather significantly in this regard.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#79

Post by hkmurakami »

unreal37 wrote: post #58

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 t…

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

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#80

Post by theycallmemorty »

ballstothewalls wrote: post #21

The email I used for facebook is facebook@mydomain.com. I have gotten several credit score emails sent to it... This started happening after I had deactivated my account. I never used apps that much, though I did sign up for them occasionally. I have never noticed this with any of my other unique emails, just the facebook one.

Is that domain publicly accessible? Could facebook@(any domain you know exists).com be a reasonable shot in the dark?
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