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Sunday 22 July 2007

Is Facebook being Infested with Spam?

In the past few weeks I've gotten friend requests on Facebook from people whom I do not know. And I don't mean people that I haven't seen in ages that I may have forgotten, I mean people I have never met — in Real Life™ or on-line.

All three of these people have in their profile in interests the exact same advertisement for this "SCHOLARSHIP4FREE" website.

The friends lists of these three people are abnormal, too. If you're familiar with Facebook, you know that one can limit which parts, if any, of your profile which people can see based on whether or not people are on or not on your friends list. You can also pick specific people and limit what they can individually see. So if you take a random person on Facebook and list their friends, a little bit more than half the Names will be links to their profiles and the other (slightly less than) half will not be links because they have made their profile private, visible only to approved friends. In these spam-peoples' friends lists, not a single one has a visible profile. One oddity.

The average person also has a large number of their Facebook friends in one network, usually the same network they themselves are part of. For the first two spam-people who sent me a friend request, each and every one of their friends was in a different network and these networks were so widely scattered across the globe that it seems a rather unlikely list of friends. This third spam-person, who's friend request came to me today, has two friends in one network, but all the rest are each in a different network. Nor were of these spam-people from whom the friend requests came actually in a network themselves. Second oddity.

From the 8th through the 15th I had holidays from school, and since I was so bored I took one of the these spam-people and wrote down “her” list of friends and then I went through the friends of those friends and then the friends of the friends of the friends, a total of four levels. For us real people, our friends usually know each other and everybody in the group is in each other's friend list. Not so for these spam-people. None of their friends knew each other and it was the rare friend of a friend of a friend who had another friend of a friend of a friend in their friend list. Third oddity.

Any single one of those three things would be unremarkably odd. I know a bunch of people on Facebook who haven't placed themselves in a network — yet most of their friends are in the same network and they know each other. I'm sure there are some well travelled people who have friends and acquaintances all over the globe, yet again there are clusters of friends in the same network and some level of common friends. Ball these things together plus the spamvertisement? It's just too much a coincidence.

They have got to be false networks of friends set up under false pretenses that randomly send friend requests to real people. The real people go “Hunh? Who's this?” and look up the profile for a clue. Et voilà, they have seen the spam!

The odd thing is, I have been thinking of writing a “Facebook crawler” that would trace friend-links for either a “Seven Degrees Of…” game, or to us the data in an OpenGL program that would create a three-dimensional graphical web of how people are connected. I guess somebody got there ahead of me and decided to use it for nefarious purposes. :-P

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