Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

Facebook is just a huge mess, really. The other day I was amazed at one particular scam that was so obvious, I decided to investigate. Someone made a page that promised a free iPhone 5 (even though there is no such thing) and had sent over 800,000 invites to people in 3 days. Over 20% answered, liked the page, and entered an email address in a form (as the fan page instructed). The wall was filled with comments like "I hope I win!" and such. There was even some people commenting on the fact that there is no such thing as an iPhone 5, and in every case the answer from other users was basically "who cares? what do we have to lose? it might be true"<p>Moral of the story? There's enough gullible people on Facebook for scammers to make money, regardless what measure Facebook puts in place.

I do not see any problem here.<p>&#62; [...] much of it configured to be available only to people on the user's list of friends.<p>And it was. People randomly accept friends and then have their data configured to be shared with them. In this case, the problem was not Facebook but was sitting in front of the computer.

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.

Internet users opt in to providing their personal details on the internet and then knowingly accept connections from unknown parties, upset about "privacy breaches".<p>This, and more on News at 11.

One 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.<p>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?

Any estimate of the number of bots posing as people on facebook? Any way it could be like 100 million? Can facebook could prove or disprove either way?<p>Seems both advertising prices and their valuation are linked to this number, I'm curious what kind of due diligence has been done if social bots are as easy as article makes it sound.

"Within two weeks, 976, or about 19 percent of the requests, were accepted.<p>Of the 3,517 users who received the second round of requests, 2,079, or about 59 percent, accepted."<p>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

It 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?

"Steal" is stretched thin here. People made their information public.

I am going to delete my facebook account this November 5. I encourage others to do the same.

Kinda 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?<p>"used programming interfaces from ihearthquotes.com" seems to be down/unknown the the googles?

Another way to do this is just to use the search method that's part of the Facebook Graph API (replace watermelon in the URL with your query) - <a href="https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=watermelon&#38;type=post" rel="nofollow">https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=watermelon&#38;type=post</a><p>You'd be surprised the amount of information that people post publicly.

This might sound harsh but...<p>Who care?<p>How long are people going to keep believing that information you share with people who share with other random people is ... "private"?<p>I've friended spam-bots entirely for shits giggles. Seriously.<p>I like Facebook a lot. Seriously. I'm there pseudo-nonymously but constantly. But naturally I post nothing I don't want totally public 'cause nothing on Facebook is private to start with.<p>Define "privacy" in the context of Facebook. You can't and that's the point.

Is 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.