Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by michael_dorfman » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 11:38 AM UTC

mkjones wrote: post #39

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).

What is the difference (in practice) between clicking "not now" to an unwanted friend request, and simply ignoring it?

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

#52

Post by jplewicke » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 2:14 PM UTC

inconditus wrote: post #16

pork wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can get names and Facebook IDs of user's friends for anyone who signs in with your app. I don't believe you can fetch their friends through the API, so the game companies should have access to only edges in which one person uses a game.

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

#53

Post by endlessvoid94 » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:55 PM UTC

megablast wrote: post #42

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is literally an advertising industry with this fact at its foundation.

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

#54

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 12:18 AM UTC

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.

I actually got one of these requests and reported it as a scam. One of the reasons I knew it was a scam was because the facebook picture came from one of the stockphoto websites.