Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts

Nobody's got the source code ? I tried to checked it out but I get 403's again...

Browsing the code I found this: http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-... ... idx * 11000 + Math.random() * 1000

So in other words, it downloads the ith friend at time 11*i +/- 1s; an average of one download every 11.5s might just be sufficiently slow to avoid getting banned from Facebook. Obviously, Facebook could look for patterns in their logs that look like the tool (too high a ratio of friend data downloads to other pages, for example, or an unnaturally high goodness of fit to 11s plus uniform variation), but it would probably be quite expensive for them to make such searches too complex, and if an arms race between the autoblockers and the downloaders ensued, the downloaders would have the upper hand because Facebook has the disadvantages of needing to avoid false positives and to deal with the large amount of data they would need to process to do any complex statistical analysis across all access requests.

A few sources cite the median number of Facebook friends at 150 - so even at the relatively slow rate of one friend data download a minute (perhaps with some intervening decoy requests), half of all Facebook users could download all friend data in 2.5 hours. A non-bot user could easily hit Facebook at that rate, and Facebook would get very bad PR if they started banning a significant proportion of their user base due to false positives.

I would phrase the facts a little differently. I would say that if you use this tool, FB may choose to discontinue your service, while not making a personal recommendation either way.

Quite honestly, if FB chooses to "kick me off" for taking action to reduce my dependency on their service... No great loss. My business will not fail. My kids will still love me in the morning. And my friends will email me as they always have.

Ultimately, I view the threat of kicking me off FB as roughly equivalent to a cable company telling me that if I don't take a particular bundle of services, they won't do business with me any more. Well, ok, you win, let's not do business any more.

I'd be curious what would happen if thousand of people used the tool rather a lone researcher.

As we saw with Facebook's censorship and uncensorship of lamebook.com, their "terms" seem to be essentially "we'll do what we can get away with and back-off if enough people push back".

As a downside, if it finds a duplicate when exporting to Gmail, it refuses to export the contact instead of merging the information.

Facebook was explicit in their reply to Google that they feel they can block people exporting their friend's emails. Friend emails are exported by the "export tool" - in fact, you get but a list of names from that.

I would be very interested in looking at the code and noting people's experience with this. One writer was kicked off Facebook for exporting his address two years ago.

I had a friend create a pipe where he synced his fB to Yahoo, and then Yahoo to Gmail to put his contacts in Gmail... I was contemplating writing a Firefox (or Chrome) extension where you input your Yahoo / Google / Facebook account info. and the extension goes off and does the piping for you. But! this looks awesome, need to go test (by reactivating my fB account...)

Do you know of a list of services that actually make use of these domains?

Once you click that, just follow the accompanying instructions and it should work - although be warned it takes a long time, especially if you're doing it for a lot of "Friends".

But it also has the ability to automagically use OAuth to connect with gmail to upload contact information.

This is latest QT thing I can find:

http://gitorious.org/qfacebook (supersedes Google's port of an iphone library).

But access might depend more on permissions than the library. Information on this would be GOOD to have.

edit: I'd assume "history" also trips the history alert: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/history.html

edit again: the extension has "tabs" permission only. Very little to worry about, unless you're paranoid about your browsing history.

However, to get a real name, they would need to get Google to reveal an IP address, and then the user's ISP to reveal account details - hardly a simple process.

Google isn't going to hand over the IP of the authors, so they would need to file a (probably baseless) lawsuit and try to subpoena the names - something Google is likely to fight since the software is in their interests too.

if (request.pissOffZuckerberg) { startExportFriendData(); }