Interesting Facebook idea.

killer2021

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So we all know that we can only see people's photos, wall posts, and other information if you are their friend (depending on their privacy settings).

There is also a setting in facebook where you can download all the information you've uploaded to facebook - images, wall posts, basically everything facebook knows about you.

Now most people share tons of stuff on their facebook since they are attention whores and what not. They are also much more willing to share stuff that to say the least ought to be kept private such as inappropriate photos, e-mail address, phone numbers, addresses so on so forth. The reason they do this is because they think that only their friends are going to view this information.

Here is the idea: What if we create a software that can go and rip all this data from facebook. Basically you have someone's account and they have 300-500+ friends. The software will go to each profile and download everything - all wall posts, photos etc.

Once its downloaded all the information can now be put in one big folder and used to data mine it. For example, you could do a search for e-mail addresses that have been posted on the walls. Phone numbers that have been posted on the walls. There is a lot of value in these large databases which is only extracted if you have lots of data.

The potential for this type of project is huge. The only issue is actually getting access to people's accounts or getting their permission to data mine the profiles. You could also go around and randomly adding people. With every person who adds you basically get access to all the information they have posted SINCE THEY JOINED FACEBOOK.

Thoughts?
 
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I had similar idea about year ago, but I never even start with work. Think... how much fake accounts would you need to access data and then HDDs to save all data... which should be well organised otherwise this is pointless.

Then you can start spaming with those fake accounts and selling data or just ... do nothing and watch whole facebook ... :D
 
I had similar idea about year ago, but I never even start with work. Think... how much fake accounts would you need to access data and then HDDs to save all data... which should be well organised otherwise this is pointless.

Then you can start spaming with those fake accounts and selling data or just ... do nothing and watch whole facebook ... :D

Yea, like I said, the hardest part is finding enough accounts to data mine. The best accounts are those that have 300+ legitimate friends. Probably easiest way to do this is to buy the accounts. Also there are lots of ways to get the accounts indirectly. Every now and then there is some massive e-mail/password leak from some site getting hacked. I am sure lots of those people use the same e-mail/password combination. Plus right now its kind of pointless to hack facebook accounts because for most hackers they see little value in a hacked facebook accounts. The only real value to them is to spam facebook but that is not the true value of facebook. The real value lies in all the information that has already been posted to facebook. With 750 million people using facebook, the amount of data on facebook is staggering.

Also I don't think storage is going to be the issue. I saw at frys like 1 TB hard drives going for like 50$ bucks. Just think of how many images you can store in 1tb. The wall posts would be very tiny to store. If you did manage to fill up 1tb then I am sure you have a crap load of information to make money off of.
 
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I think this could be done relatively quickly with the graph API, and I think it can also search profiles who don't have their privacy configured properly either.
 
I think this could be done relatively quickly with the graph API, and I think it can also search profiles who don't have their privacy configured properly either.

Yes, the profiles that aren't configured properly is the low hanging fruit. Best to build an engine that taps those profiles then we can work on moving to tapping profiles that are configured properly.
 
thanks for the idea , hope it works , so never mind i will give it a try.
 
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