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Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

#11

Post by pork »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #10

It makes you wonder what private data sources actually have of the facebook graph (Not including facebook). Does someone have the whole facebook social graph downloaded or a large portion?

At 500+ mil users with an average of 150 connections, you're looking at 500,000,000 * 150 / 2 = 3.75e10 edges. Assuming generously that each edge can be stored with a 4 byte unsigned int, you're looking at about 140 GB. I haven't seen any scrapes that even come CLOSE to that, an that's ignoring throttling and privacy controls.

Edit: more likely, you'd get the data as (id1, id2) pairs with 8 byte longs for each id. That's about 600 GB.

Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

#13

Post by kleiba »

JBiserkov wrote: post #8

"Within two weeks, 976, or about 19 percent of the requests, were accepted. Of the 3,517 users who received the second round of requests, 2,079, or about 59 percent, accepted." It seems to me that either people are really indiscriminate in who they accept as their 'friends', or the 'randomly selected "people"' were actually other socio bots :-D

Or people are more likely to accept a friend request when you already share a common friend on FB.

Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

#14

Post by brainfed »

kellyreid wrote: post #12

Internet users opt in to providing their personal details on the internet and then knowingly accept connections from unknown parties, upset about "privacy breaches". This, and more on News at 11.

Most people who'd be willing to accept random friend requests on Facebook probably have no idea that this even happened.

Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

#16

Post by inconditus »

pork wrote: post #11
zitterbewegung wrote: post #10

It makes you wonder what private data sources actually have of the facebook graph (Not including facebook). Does someone have the whole facebook social graph downloaded or a large portion?

At 500+ mil users with an average of 150 connections, you're looking at 500,000,000 * 150 / 2 = 3.75e10 edges. Assuming generously that each edge can be stored with a 4 byte unsigned int, you're looking at about 140 GB. I haven't seen any scrapes that even come CLOSE to that, an that's ignoring throttling and privacy controls. Edit: more likely, you'd get the data as (id1, id2) pairs with 8 byte longs for each id. Th…

This is an ignorant question, but do apps have access to the social graph? If so, I'd assume the top game applications have a substantial portion.

Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

#18

Post by zach »

DevX101 wrote: post #15

If anyone from Facebook is reading...You guys should add a "Do you know this person?" option to friend requests received from new accounts. If the amount of negative responses to the question surpass some threshold you flag the sending account as suspicious.

There is already an "I don't know this person" option when declining friend requests as far as I've seen.

Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

#19

Post by yaix »

I do not see any problem here.

> [...] much of it configured to be available only to people on the user's list of friends.

And it was. People randomly accept friends and then have their data configured to be shared with them. In this case, the problem was not Facebook but was sitting in front of the computer.

Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

#20

Post by windsurfer »

georgieporgie wrote: post #9

Is that stealing? Not to get into a "data wants to be free thing", it just seems like the automatic scraping of (effectively) public information, by an algorithm which can't be held to terms of use.

I don't think it's stealing, but it's certainly rude.
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