A morning with a face off

Finding people with a single search just by their name is an easy task. Doing the same thing sometimes is as easy if you have their email id. I have a simple trick to try that.
Suppose you got an email id, and of course we have facbook's social graph API. The probability of finding that email id on facebook is almost equal as having that email associated with a real human being. People don't care whether they can be searched by their email id or not on popular social networks. So we try to face off those people.
Simply it goes like this:
If you have a facebook application, it needs extended permission to access particular user's extended profile. But if you are logged in facebook (of course as a human being) you can search them by their email id and see their extended information. This simple script is an automated alternative for this.

The fun part of this approach is : you never need any permission from that user to access his extended profile, if you are a human being then it makes sense, but for this automated approach this is a kind of fun.

So let me show how you can try this.

1) First you need to register a facebook application here : http://developers.facebook.com/setup/

2) Grab the access token by using this script: http://blog.carduner.net/2010/05/26/authenticating-with-facebook-on-the-...

This code is to be executed in terminal, you need to be logged into your facebook profile, it will just ask you for essential permissions. Using your own facebook profile you can easily to do that. We are doing this to get an access token that we will use to access social graph api.

3) Now the real thing. Checkout this code:

http://code.google.com/p/faceoff/source/checkout . Edit this code and fill in your facebook application credentials ( see my commented lines in code ) and also credentials for the account which will be used by this script to log into facebook and trigger search against targeted users.

4) Now we are ready to rock, make sure that generated '.fb_access_token' and this code from repo, both are on the same place as it uses this '.fb_access_token' from local path.

5) Now go to your shell, suppose I saved it as 'facebook.py' then execute this

$> python faceebok.py [user's email id ]

example:

$>python facebook.py [email protected] > face.html

if someone is using this email id with facebook then this will grab the extended profile and will save the rendered html into face.html. Open this file in your browser.

This can be scary to people who really care of their privacy at social networks. Just go and check your default settings :)

Have fun !