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Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

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Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#61

Post by rmc »

cs702 wrote: post #13

Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person. Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!

Your implication is that Facebook themselves sold this data. The orignial article says that it was from apps that people isntalled from a 3rd party, not Facebook.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#62

Post by unreal37 »

mandeepj wrote: post #60
unreal37 wrote: post #58

I suppose any 15 year old with programming skill can do this. Create an app (kill zombies!) and then when the popularity dies down, sell out your users info to the highest bidder. Kinda sensationalist at the end - "DO YOU STILL FEEL SECURE?" Uh yeah, I do. I get hundreds of spam a day that Google puts into a little folder for me to erase. Go ahead and email me, and join that exclusive folder right away. Oh you want t…

If the sender adds the required headers into his email then it is very likely that google or any other email service provider will not consider the email as spam. Regarding facebook I partially agree with u. Sometimes the message from non-friends goes into other folder and sometimes I can see it in the regular mail folder.

Don't tell the spammers making millions of dollars about that header trick.

Seriously though, I don't think a couple of headers will cause an email to become not spam. Google's filter is probably Bayesian, and considers the content of the message, the matching between the originating server and the reply-to address, the spam history of the originating server, any links in the message, how many times it sees the exact same message, how many people mark it as spam, etc.

So maybe it will get through to the first few hundred people, and then they'll block it.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#63

Post by sold »

cpeterso wrote: post #57
Fightback wrote: post #10

I laugh at the censor fail. See selected field.

I'm not seeing it. What is the censor fail in line 66?

The picture was edited in the meantime. Previously the formula field (displaying content of current cell) was not grayed.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#66

Post by tvladeck »

rmc wrote: post #61
cs702 wrote: post #13

Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person. Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!

Your implication is that Facebook themselves sold this data. The orignial article says that it was from apps that people isntalled from a 3rd party, not Facebook.

Doesn't matter. The company that got the data then sold it on for $5, which gives us an indication of how much they had to pay [1] to get the data from FB in the first place.

[1] I'm using "pay" loosely here. I have no idea what they had to give up or produce in order to get the data, but presumably FB received something of value.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#67

Post by jwegan »

mandeepj wrote: post #60
unreal37 wrote: post #58

I suppose any 15 year old with programming skill can do this. Create an app (kill zombies!) and then when the popularity dies down, sell out your users info to the highest bidder. Kinda sensationalist at the end - "DO YOU STILL FEEL SECURE?" Uh yeah, I do. I get hundreds of spam a day that Google puts into a little folder for me to erase. Go ahead and email me, and join that exclusive folder right away. Oh you want t…

If the sender adds the required headers into his email then it is very likely that google or any other email service provider will not consider the email as spam. Regarding facebook I partially agree with u. Sometimes the message from non-friends goes into other folder and sometimes I can see it in the regular mail folder.

Adding the proper headers such as DKIM, SPF, etc., are used to make sure a spammer can't send mail pretending to be someone else.

All spam systems still look at the content of the message plus the reputation of the IP/domain when determining if a message should be marked as spam or not.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#68

Post by notatoad »

cs702 wrote: post #13

Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person. Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!

>Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand

I don't think that rule applies for digital goods where the cost of reproduction is zero. The supply is infinite.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#70

Post by Permit »

Achshar wrote: post #64
sneak wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried scraping Facebook?

What should I expect?

They're pretty clever. When I started programming in 2009, I wrote a small scraper that would create accounts, friend people and steal their info if they accepted. (I never released it past my own friends list and never sold the data).

There were the obvious checks for CAPTCHAs when too much activity was detected, but other subtleties as well. If you looked at too many people's profiles, emails wouldn't be displayed as text, but as images. A person would be unlikely to notice as the pages looked identical, but dynamic changes like that make it harder to scrape some things. Introducing even rudimentary OCR requirements is enough to turn away a lot of programmers.

I'm not saying it's not possible to pull off. But Facebook has set it up so any money you might make this way will likely not be worth the development time required.

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