Socialbot experiment collects 250GB of data from clueless Facebook users

, Facebook. Every day its hundreds of millions of users post updates, upload pictures, and tag to their hearts’ content while paying nary a mind to the site’s privacy settings. And as we’ve seen numerous times before, the data being shared is precisely the type bad guys need to compromise Facebook (and other) accounts.
In an experiment at the University of British Columbia, Canadian researchers showed just how easy it is to harvest data on the world’s biggest social network. The team set up a legion of 102 socialbots — autonomous digital servants
that are designed specifically for chores like this — and unleashed them on Facebook.
Over the course of the experiment, the bots sent out around 8,500 friend requests and were approved by just over 3,000 of their “marks,” amounting to an extended network of almost 1.1 million users. If you’ve not turned a critical eye to your privacy settings, it’s quite possible that your most intimate of intimates is set to be shared with friends of friends, giving the bots a massive amount of reach and loads of data to feed off of.
The team found that users with a large list of friends were more likely to accept requests, and they achieved their high hit rate partially through the use of sexy photos borrowed from ratings site HotOrNot. If you’ve ever gotten a request from a slightly too-hot looking girl with extra cleavage out of the blue, there’s a decent chance “she” was a socialbot.
The UBC bots then went to work collecting data, and managed to do so mostly under Facebook’s radar. Only 20 of the socialbots were blacklisted, and all of those had been reported by users for spam — none were caught as a result of Facebook’s built-in security measures.
By the end of the trial period, the team was raking in nearly 200 bits of personal data per day and 250GB was ultimately gathered — including more than 40,000 email addresses and around 11,000 phone numbers.
The moral of the story: Facebook’s security system still has a long way to go, and it’s up to you and your common sense to make sure your friending habits are safe. Oh, and for crying out loud, don’t post your real phone number.