Comments on: Facebook Giving a Bit Too Much Away

By: Antony

Antony — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:29:27 +0000

I’ve just written my own python script to do exactly this: pull off a social network from people’s public facebook listings. Using the BeautifulSoup library it isn’t actually that hard.

As an extension, I’d love to be logged into facebook whilst trawling. Some users have open profiles on networks, or at least did. University networks are common for this and the amount of information you can pull from people’s profiles rapidly mounts up,

As a second extension, I’d like to do twitter. Whilst real names aren’t the order of the day on twitter it would be interesting and the API makes it much easier to trawl.

I do have one question though: you’ll no doubt have come across users who add everyone they ever meet. As such, a facebook network might not, necessarily, represent the true nature of the individual’s social life; we need more information to make this truly useful, such as how often do these people talk.

So you’ll know who’s met who, but not who’s best friends with who, given the above methods.

By: Asma

Asma — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:47:22 +0000

I’m always concerned about joining Facebook because of Facebook’s public page view. Why should anyone looking for me could access my friends’ public profiles? I went through your study Eight Friends are Enough just when I was finishing up my article. I have mentioned it as a recommended reading on my post http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/idol/2009/04/16/you-are-on-google-you-are-internetnal/

By: Joseph Bonneau

Joseph Bonneau — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:59:29 +0000

Also covered on Dark Reading, with a response from Facebook: http://www.darkreading.com/security/privacy/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216402556

By: Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Anderson — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:31:23 +0000

You might think so, but Facebook doesn't seem to value user privacy over the ability to roll out features quickly. I have it from a reliable source that there is no privacy review process for such applications. Also, you may be interested to know that the story has been picked up by The Guardian!

By: steph

steph — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:09:29 +0000

Interesting second point. One would suppose that a least a crude review of possible privacy implications would take place before new features/applications are introduced. Which means privacy concerns were either gravely underestimated or blatantly ignored.

By: Ross Anderson

Ross Anderson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:15:40 +0000

Another interesting point is this. The Government wants to spend 15 billion pounds on the IMP database of all traffic data – email headers, itemized phone bills, and the like – so that they can track the UK social graph. This paper shows that you don’t need to spend all that money – you can get the social graph just by scraping the public data from Facebook.