Marketers Can Mine Your Facebook Info

Recently posted on Wired…. Need an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each ? such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level?

Facebook has just the free feature you’re looking for, thanks to its recent privacy changes.

The hack, first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through e-mail addresses in their contact list.

But as Klein points out, a marketer could take a list of 1,000 e-mail addresses, either legally or illegally collected and upload those through a dummy account which then lets the user see all the profiles created using those addresses.  Given Facebook’s ubiquity and most people’s reliance on a single e-mail address, the harvest could be quite rich.

Using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of e-mail addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of marketing profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends, depending on how users have their profiles set.

Run a few algorithms on that data and you can start to make inferences about race, income, sexual orientation and interests.

While that information isn’t available for all users, Facebook changed its privacy settings in early December so that certain information can’t be made private, including one’s name, current city, profile picture, gender, networks and friend list (the latter can be somewhat hidden from public view).

Anyone with your e-mail address can harvest that information, the company admits.

That’s unacceptable, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kevin Bankston, who says that’s not the Facebook people signed up for.

“Just because Facebook users want to share personal info with their friends does not mean they want to share it with any nefarious parties on the internet,” Bankston said, “but that is exactly what Facebook is forcing its users to do.”

With the new privacy settings, users can shut off being found by their name by changing who can find them on Facebook or by web searches.  But even if you restrict as much as you can, if an outsider knows your e-mail address, they can find the rest of your profile information that Facebook now designates as public, namely your name, profile picture (if you’ve uploaded one), current city (if you’ve filled one out), networks (if you’ve joined any) and pages you are a fan of, according to Facebook.

“If someone knows your e-mail address, they can find you even if you’ve restricted search privacy,” Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes told Wired.com.

That’s very valuable information to marketers, who can use it to evaluate their product, understand their user base better, create targeted marketing materials or sell the information to others.

But Facebook says it works to catch rogue marketers and sets a limit on the number of e-mail addresses that can be run through its system, according to Noyes.

“We’ve developed several systems to detect and block malicious use of the Friend Finder,” Noyes said. “For example, we don’t allow users to upload contact lists past a certain size. We also block users who upload contacts at an anomalous rate.

Still, the onus is on users to make a decision about their information, according to the company.

“However, we encourage people with concerns to configure their privacy settings appropriately,” Noyes said.

Users should know that the information exposed in this little hack is not unlike that which is turned over to third-party applications whenever you or one of your friends installs an application, including such things as quizzes to decide what kind of pet you are.

It’s not clear if any marketers are using this loophole, but it would be very difficult to know

Facebook is pushing its users to share information in an attempt to keep Twitter from eclipsing the site as the center of the net’s online conversations. The site hopes getting users to publish more publicly will make it the place people turn when they need to find recommendations, a function currently dominated (with great profit) by Google.

But privacy activists say Facebook has broken the contract with its users. Some groups have filed a formal complaint with the FTC, saying the recent changes are illegal.

Augmenting marketing data to learn even more about customers isn’t new, and has been offered by companies such as Choicepoint for years. Rapleaf offers a strikingly similar service to the demonstrated hack for companies willing to pay money.

Why aren’t companies buying?

By Will Crist

I used to think of myself and my services as a fire truck looking for businesses with fires in the basement. My job was to look around, talk to people and find out if they had fires in the basement they wanted to talk about. Often, when they were willing to talk, they were also willing to let me put the fires out. In other words I could help them solve the problems they were facing. My experience was usually that people with fires in the basement were out front looking for the big fire truck to pull up. When they heard the siren, they started pointing to the building.

Maybe you have seen yourself in a similar fashion. Your offerings, your good or your services provided solutions to the problems the businesses or consumers were facing. Often, most often, the buyers who believed you could solve their problem within their time frames and budgets would buy. Systematic selling was a plus because it helped both the buyer and seller stay on track toward a decision. The decision could be either Yes or No. Either one was a clear decision and, once the decision was made, you could move on.

In the past twelve months, I have been feeling that the world has changed. There is almost universal agreement that most businesses have major problems that, if they were solved, would result in better business for them and the rest of the economy. People tell me things like: “There’s lots of businesses out there who need you these days.” When I first heard words like that, I thought, since I didn’t have a line outside my door, maybe it would be helpful if I painted my fire truck a brighter red, put a flag on it, and revved the siren up louder so people would hear me. Not only did I not get invited to put out a lot of fires, the feedback I got was the siren was annoying.

I was really confused. They have a fire. I am a firetruck. What is getting in the way?

After talking to lots of people, I have come to believe believe that many business owners have taken a pledge to not spend money. They have decided that, even though they have money (and most businesses do have money), they are not going to spend it! If someone on the phone or in their office sounds like they are trying to sell something, the conversation is over.

When I came to this conclusion, I recognized that I was as welcome to business owners as a Snickers bar in a Weight-Watchers convention.

Lots of people wanted to invite me in to help them solve their problems in management and to help them enhance their revenue, but no one wanted to spend money. It wasn’t that I wasn’t doing all the behaviors that used to result in sales. It wasn’t that my services were unproductive. That Snickers bar was very attractive. It just happened that everyone around me seemed to be on a diet.

I wonder if you are feeling the same way. You keep going out looking for business. Your products or services are top notch. They can really help people and other businesses. But nobody is buying. Sound familiar?

So what are you going to do? Nobody is spending money. The problems and limitations continue to smolder in the basement. You and I and others know we can solve the problems. But the beliefs about money and the commitment to not spending any is getting in the way.

I do know that big, red, noisy firetrucks are not the answer. Snickers bars, as attractive as they are carry too much baggage when people have pledged to not eat them. How do you help the people or businesses you know who are struggling to move forward?

If I had the answer, I would bottle it and se…ll it…. Oh that’s right no one is buying these days. So how will we help businesses out of this dilemma? There will be risks. It will require courage. Those with the most courage will take the first risks. They will have the highest probability of being at the front of the parade when the music starts again.