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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

#21

Post by brc »

kleiba wrote: post #13
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.

I'm guessing the profile pictures of the 'friends' weren't ugly people.

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

#22

Post by dendory »

Facebook is just a huge mess, really. The other day I was amazed at one particular scam that was so obvious, I decided to investigate. Someone made a page that promised a free iPhone 5 (even though there is no such thing) and had sent over 800,000 invites to people in 3 days. Over 20% answered, liked the page, and entered an email address in a form (as the fan page instructed). The wall was filled with comments like "I hope I win!" and such. There was even some people commenting on the fact that there is no such thing as an iPhone 5, and in every case the answer from other users was basically "who cares? what do we have to lose? it might be true"

Moral of the story? There's enough gullible people on Facebook for scammers to make money, regardless what measure Facebook puts in place.

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

#23

Post by pavel_lishin »

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.

> You guys should add a "Do you know this person?" option to friend requests received from new accounts.

As long as the profile is a young attractive lady, that option will rarely be chosen.

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

#24

Post by Sniffnoy »

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.

What Facebook does is to discourage people from adding people they don't know in the first place; evidently this hasn't worked. One interesting thing they used to do but don't anymore: back when they kept track of where people knew each other from, the dialog box for adding someone as a friend would ask where you knew them from, with a whole bunch of checkboxes. One was "I don't know them"; checking this would, rather than displaying boxes so you could enter more details, instead display the message "Then why are you adding them?", and change the "add friend" button to a cancel button. (I may have the exact details wrong there.)

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

#25

Post by pavel_lishin »

windsurfer wrote: post #20
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.

It's automated social engineering.

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

#26

Post by jonmc12 »

Any estimate of the number of bots posing as people on facebook? Any way it could be like 100 million? Can facebook could prove or disprove either way?

Seems both advertising prices and their valuation are linked to this number, I'm curious what kind of due diligence has been done if social bots are as easy as article makes it sound.

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

#27

Post by nostromo »

yaix wrote: post #19

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.

I suppose it's a bit of a bigger problem than that since a lot of information on Facebook is shared with friends of friends.

Because of this it's not just a problem for the bad user (like my aunt on FB), but also all of their connections (like me and 300 other people).

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

#28

Post by rorrr »

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

Most of my FB contacts are "friend collectors", they would accept any request. Most of them have 1000+ "friends". I have no clue how they can even remember that many people, let alone have meaningful relationships.

I delete contacts that don't post anything interesting after my list grows beyond 50.

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

#29

Post by modeless »

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.

They already do this.

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

#30

Post by derrida »

brc wrote: post #21
kleiba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm guessing the profile pictures of the 'friends' weren't ugly people.

Funny how those stereotypical 'beautiful' pictures found on the internet are usually ugly.
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