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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

#41

Post by bkaid »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #24
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, rathe…

Wasn't this LinkedIn instead?

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

#42

Post by megablast »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #34
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.

But now, we have one place to go to meet them all. People on craigslist are wary, otherwise it is not easy to get a group of gullible people all in one place.

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

#43

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

It is better than that though.

You see you now not only have a list email addresses. You have a list of email addresses of gullible people. Pretty smart if you ask me.

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

#44

Post by lookelsewhere »

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.

What if people begin to sell the data that they have gathered. Would it be illegal then?

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

#45

Post by Sniffnoy »

bkaid wrote: post #41
Sniffnoy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, rathe…

Wasn't this LinkedIn instead?

They may have done this also, and I have no idea who was first, but Facebook definitely did this as well. (In particular, I've never used LinkedIn.)

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

#46

Post by yaix »

nostromo wrote: post #27
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).

True. But still, you can just set your privacy options to only share this stuff with first-level friends.

The real problem with Facebook is that they collect data about you, without you being able to control that data. Everything that people have in their smartphones about you, or that other people add about you on Facebook by other means (uploaded email address books, etc) is agregated into "your" profile, even if you don't actually have a profile on Facebook.

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

#47

Post by yread »

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…

What was the quote again? "Nobody ever lost money by overestimating the stupidity."

There's also plenty of people who "like" pages because somebody put a transparent like button over them.

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

#48

Post by pmjordan »

derrida wrote: post #30
brc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure that's no accident. I suspect they're at the empirically determined sweet spot between 'beautiful/sexy' and 'loose/easy' for the maximum number of people to feel they'd both stand a chance with the person and actually would want to have sex with them.

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

#49

Post by Achshar »

hybrid11 wrote: post #37

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.

wow, THIS is interesting.. and this is like 750 million people's posts :O

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

#50

Post by ErrantX »

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…

The new privacy/group tools are a step towards helping solve that.

It's not perfect but with a little bit of organisation you can use the same FB account for random people, casual acquaintances and real friends without causing issues.

Hopefully this will only get better.

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