What is the biggest fear of users in the web?
Spending some time for research, I found out that people most fear the transparency in the web. At the same time, this doesn’t prevent them from publishing private details without thinking in the blink of an eye.
So I was curious how much information really is accessible. In the context of my bachelor thesis entitled Super Social Everybody I started an experiment which was to examine how easy the profiling of users truly is.
- profiler.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de Online Profiler
- http://github.com/southdesign/FacebookProfiler Download and Customize
Part A: Blowing the friends graph
As a network I used Facebook with the Facebook API. The first thing I had to notice was, that the information one can get out of a foreign profile is almost useless. It’s just the name, maybe the city and sex – strongly depending on the users privacy settings. So the first step was to create a shill account, which I used to befriend with the target. For that I faked an interesting Facebook profile – fitting the imaginary job description. With this account I started to request several friendships.
Part B: Profile
As soon as the friendship was accepted I was able to profile the user. For this I created a profiler that allows to login with the shill account. Once logged in, a friend list is displayed enabling the profiler to profile the target with a single click.
Try it yourself
The profiler is online, all you need is a Facebook user to log in. Go to profiler.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de and try it!
You can also customize the profiler to fit exactly you needs. Just go to http://github.com/southdesign/FacebookProfiler and clone your own copy or fork it.
Live Demo – Digital Rights Day@HdM Stuttgart
I was invited to make a speech and live demo at the Digital Rights Day of the HdM Stuttgart on June, 18th.
It’s a great honour for me – so feel free to come and see the profiler live in action.
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