Prying Data out of a Social Network

TLDR

Preventing adversaries from compiling significant amounts of user data is a major challenge for social network operators. We examine the difficulty of collecting profile and graph information from Facebook and report two major findings. We describe several novel ways third parties can extract data from Facebook and demonstrate the efficiency of these methods on crawled data. Our findings highlight that Facebook’s current personal data protection is inconsistent with users’ privacy expectations.

Abstract

Preventing adversaries from compiling significant amounts of user data is a major challenge for social network operators. We examine the difficulty of collecting profile and graph information from the popular social networking Website Facebook and report two major findings. First, we describe several novel ways in which data can be extracted by third parties. Second, we demonstrate the efficiency of these methods on crawled data. Our findings highlight how the current protection of personal data is inconsistent with user's expectations of privacy.