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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

#31

Post by joe_the_user »

This might sound harsh but...

Who care?

How long are people going to keep believing that information you share with people who share with other random people is ... "private"?

I've friended spam-bots entirely for shits giggles. Seriously.

I like Facebook a lot. Seriously. I'm there pseudo-nonymously but constantly. But naturally I post nothing I don't want totally public 'cause nothing on Facebook is private to start with.

Define "privacy" in the context of Facebook. You can't and that's the point.

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

#33

Post by joe_the_user »

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.

The problem is that that this is where Facebook's contradictions really appear.

The problem is that Facebook needs to both maintain the fiction that it's a network for only your "real life" friends to seem safe and keeping finding new friends to keep the interest up.

But the average person only has about 150 friends and they're either currently on Facebook or they probably never will be. So to get new friends, people have to friend "friends-of-friends", people sharing common interests, people with attractive photos and so-forth. But if Facebook were to really discourage non-real-friends, everyone's friend numbers would drop and the site's excitement level would start going down.

It is a weird kind of situation... Facebook is become more like "the regular Internet" how that works out will be interesting...

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

#34

Post by endlessvoid94 »

dendory wrote: post #22

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…

Newsflash: There are enough gullible people EVERYWHERE for these things to work. This is not a new thing.

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

#35

Post by Hitchhiker »

joe_the_user wrote: post #33
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.

The problem is that that this is where Facebook's contradictions really appear. The problem is that Facebook needs to both maintain the fiction that it's a network for only your "real life" friends to seem safe and keeping finding new friends to keep the interest up. But the average person only has about 150 friends and they're either currently on Facebook or they probably never will be. So to get new friends, people…

This is a composite of previous comments, someone should hack a " Facebook is dead " essay.

Cure to the present roberry 2.0 - gear up a homomorphic scheme[1] combined with a generative personal cloud[2].

The " personal " in PC was most important when C stood for computer. Next, it will be most important when C stands for cloud.

The other wall this epic bubble is going to run against sooner or later - as people wake up at an intuitive level :

"Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data."[3]

All of this nightmare will be compounded by the stunning crap-storm about to emerge in economies world over.

[1] - http://crypto.stanford.edu/craig/

[2] - http://futureoftheinternet.org

[3] - http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

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

#36

Post by jprobert »

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?

The only way possible to download the whole FB social graph is to get permission to do so from every FB user. People can scrape public info but the social graph allows access to a users friends, friends of friends, likes, comments, checkins an so forth.

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

#37

Post by hybrid11 »

Another way to do this is just to use the search method that's part of the Facebook Graph API (replace watermelon in the URL with your query) - https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=watermelon&type=post

You'd be surprised the amount of information that people post publicly.

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

#38

Post by 100ideas »

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.

someone should tell facebook that real friends are usually co-tagged in eachother's photos.

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

#39

Post by mkjones »

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.

We have that: http://mkjon.es/friend.png. In addition to data from that, we also look at how many people click "not now" when someone adds them as a friend.

These signals (and a number of other factors) are taken into account when classifying if friend requests are spammy / malicious.

(I work on the anti-spam team at Facebook).

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

#40

Post by jaredsohn »

phillmv wrote: post #3
stfu wrote: post #2

Kinda obvious that Facebook is getting scraped up and down for all sorts of reasons. Wasn't there some "art" project of some guy guy who recently scraped millions of (public) profiles? "used programming interfaces from ihearthquotes.com" seems to be down/unknown the the googles?

>Wasn't there some "art" project of some guy guy who recently scraped millions of (public) profiles? Oh, it's amazing - http://openbook.org/

I think the grandparent post may have been thinking of this: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/223241 ('Dating' Site Imports 250,000 Facebook Profiles, Without Permission)

For the site linked in the parent post, it looks like the site uses the Facebook Graph API search function for public posts and then makes additional queries to show information about the creator of each post. Since you don't need a Facebook account to use it, I suspect they are making the queries via the server. They might be accumulating the profile photo data as they retrieve it, but it doesn't look any different than any other site that uses the server-side Facebook APIs.

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