Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
theregister.co.uk
Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#2Kinda 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?
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#3Kinda 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/
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#4Kinda 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?
It's a typo: iheartquotes.com is up.
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#5One major problem is that Facebook's privacy model for a long time was "trusted with everything"/"trusted with little", and the criteria for entering the inner circle was "the user adds you as a friend." Combine this will social pressure to reciprocate friend requests, and you have a mess.
I wonder what effect allowing assymmetric contacts will have. Will users get used to people "subscribing" to them without reciprocating, or will we all try to achieve the ultimate high score by "friending" everyone we can get ahold of?
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#6Kinda 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?
It's a typo: iheartquotes.com is up.
Thanks!
The site seems somewhat odd in relation to the story. Sure they have some API for pulling quotes, but using this for Facebook scraping seems a bit out of proportion.
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a typo: iheartquotes.com is up.
Thanks! The site seems somewhat odd in relation to the story. Sure they have some API for pulling quotes, but using this for Facebook scraping seems a bit out of proportion.
The bots used the quotation site to generate dummy content, not for scaping.
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#8"Within two weeks, 976, or about 19 percent of the requests, were accepted.
Of the 3,517 users who received the second round of requests, 2,079, or about 59 percent, accepted."
It seems to me that either people are really indiscriminate in who they accept as their 'friends', or the 'randomly selected "people"' were actually other socio bots :-D
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#9Is 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.
Re: Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data
#10It 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?