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Undocumented Facebook API to identify friends in photos

narenonit.blogspot.com

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Re: Undocumented Facebook API to identify friends in photos

#2

Post by gcr »

Yup yup! This was the screenscraping technique we used to turn Facebook into an automatic face detector: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04504

It's a giant pain to screenscrape this using 'curl'. If I recall correctly, the bounding box coordinates I wanted are set as CSS properties inside inline HTML sent to the client wrapped up in a Javascript string literal as part of Javascript served to the client as the result of an AJAX call, if memory serves correctly. To get my screenscraper working, I had to do the AJAX call, parse the literal javascript, walk the AST to find the string literal I needed, parse the HTML to find the element I needed, then use the computed CSS properties. Looks like the author of this post found a much nicer way.

(note: that work wasn't about recognition; it was about just finding the faces in images, not identifying them)

Re: Undocumented Facebook API to identify friends in photos

#5

Post by beatpanda »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #4
fallenshell wrote: post #3

This is scary.

It's not that bad. > I found this API has a limitation it only suggests people in the photo who are in your FB friend list

Yeah, OK, now think about the version Facebook (and thus law enforcement, intelligence agencies and advertisers) has access to.

Re: Undocumented Facebook API to identify friends in photos

#7

Post by anc84 »

beatpanda wrote: post #5
tokenizerrr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that bad. > I found this API has a limitation it only suggests people in the photo who are in your FB friend list

Yeah, OK, now think about the version Facebook (and thus law enforcement, intelligence agencies and advertisers) has access to.

Uhm... Duh?

Re: Undocumented Facebook API to identify friends in photos

#8

Post by bknarendra »

gcr wrote: post #2

Yup yup! This was the screenscraping technique we used to turn Facebook into an automatic face detector: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04504 It's a giant pain to screenscrape this using 'curl'. If I recall correctly, the bounding box coordinates I wanted are set as CSS properties inside inline HTML sent to the client wrapped up in a Javascript string literal as part of Javascript served to the client as the result of an…

Yes if you see the code, I extract the JSON object from response by removing the for(;;); in the beginning and then parse the json to hash and flatten it to array of strings. As there is only 1 value that will have the html content, I found this by using some css selector of the content and then parse the html and used unique css selector class for the names of the users.

Re: Undocumented Facebook API to identify friends in photos

#9

Post by Animats »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #4
fallenshell wrote: post #3

This is scary.

It's not that bad. > I found this API has a limitation it only suggests people in the photo who are in your FB friend list

Right. That's Facebook's compromise on privacy. EPIC is suing them over even that.[1]

Face.com did facial recognition on Facebook with no limits back in 2010.[2] Then Facebook bought them and killed the broad face recognition.[3]

There are other face recognition companies now, but they're keeping a lower profile about how broad their database is. Except for Findface[4] in Russia. They loaded up the entire photo database of Vcontact, a social network in Russia. 70% success in identifying random young people on the St. Petersburg metro.

[1] https://www.epic.org/privacy/facebook/Facebook-Biometric-Rul... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20100701083622/http://face.com/ [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20120723211743/http://face.com/ [4] http://findface.ru/

Re: Undocumented Facebook API to identify friends in photos

#10

Post by tedmiston »

gcr wrote: post #2

Yup yup! This was the screenscraping technique we used to turn Facebook into an automatic face detector: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04504 It's a giant pain to screenscrape this using 'curl'. If I recall correctly, the bounding box coordinates I wanted are set as CSS properties inside inline HTML sent to the client wrapped up in a Javascript string literal as part of Javascript served to the client as the result of an…

I'd really like to read your paper. Everywhere I've found it referenced has a paywall. Is the full text freely available anywhere?
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