Recommended: Code reveals top victims of your relentless Facebook stalking

Facebook

Names of my Facebook friends have been blurred to protect the innocent.

Facebook “apps” that claim to reveal who stalks your Facebook profile most are usually scams that trick you into spamming up the profiles of your Facebook friends. There is a way, however, to find out whose Facebook pages you loiter on most — a bit of code that ranks people according to who you’re most likely to search for.

Mind you, while the code is on the customer side, in the browser, where we Facebook civilians can see it, it’s designed for the Facebook algorithm that autocompletes names you’re searching for or tagging in posts or photos. Hacker News contributor Jeremy Keeshin came across the file, dubbed first_degree.php, while he was mining Facebook’s inner workings for tips on speeding up autocomplete on his rating website ranuk.com.

“Facebook gives explicit numbers to the directed edges (connection going from you to your friend), about how much they think you are looking for this person,” Keeshin writes in his blog. ”Although you already know who you look at most, it is eerie to see the list they have come up with — and the numbers they give. The more negative the number, the more Facebook thinks you are looking for them.”

Ordinarily, running weird code on your Facebook profile is not recommended, but this one seems fine to us and the many others who have tried it. Keeshin posted a bookmark on his blog post so you can drag it to your Firefox, Safari or Chrome browser bookmark section. (Go here to get it.) Once you have it bookmarked, go to your Facebook profile, then click the bookmark. A list of your most wanted should appear.

Note: If you’ve got your Facebook profile locked down with https (which you should), you’ll have to disable it to use the feature via Account Settings Security Secure Browsing.

As Keeshin notes, the code seems to factor whose profile you visit most, who you interact with and who you’ve most recently friended. For example, I found someone near the top of the list whom I’ve just friended even though we’ve never really interacted. As such, the list changes as your Facebook habits do, and you may actually be surprised with how your friends are tallied. In fact, you may find it totally random.

“The inputs to this ranking function explicitly do not include other users’ behavior on the site,” Facebook developer Keith Adams emphasizes in the Hacker News forum, one of several forums where he addresses this discovery and the obligatory privacy panic that follows any new discovery of how Facebook works. Adams also points out that no one else can see your rankings unless they are logged on as you.

Note: You can prevent people from stealing your credentials and logging in to your Facebook account and seeing who you Facebook-stalk most by enabling the https setting on your Facebook account. You can keep your parents/spouse/roomates from seeing who you stalk most by logging off when you walk away from the computer.

No doubt you’ve got way more embarrassing stuff to worry about on your Facebook profile than how the Facebook algorithm ranks your friends. If anything, the first_degree.php code reminds us how Facebook limits our world. Even if you have more than 250 Facebook friends, you only see the posts from the people with whom you interact most, so it’s easy to forget about those people you’d still like to hear from, even if you don’t interact that much.

According to Facebook, you can change the limited number of friends who show up in your Newsfeed by scrolling to the bottom of your profile and clicking Edit Options. In our own experience, as well as the anecdotes we’ve heard from Technolog readers, this doesn’t result in much of a mix up. You’re better served repeatedly clicking on the profiles of the people you’ve fallen out of touch with.

via TechCrunch

More on the annoying way we live now:

• Man steals $57K from neighbors using their Facebook info
• UK cops will find you, and they will shame you … digitally
• Mark Zuckerberg not your security daddy

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.

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Users Protest Irreversible Facebook Suspensions Following False Accusations of …

Social media has become a very crucial tool for networking, particularly in the media for posting news, but what happens when social media becomes inhibiting in the social network?

In the excitement about the opening day of early access to J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore website on Monday, I wrote a humor column, or tried to, about five tips for coping with the wait. Pottermore has generated buzz in not only the Farmington Valley, but also around the world. It is common practice for web journalists and bloggers to post links to their articles on Facebook and Twitter, as well as relevant Facebook pages so that articles reach a wider audience.

On Tuesday, I did a search on Facebook for Pottermore pages, posting the following message on at least 10 pages that have a public wall: “Has anyone from Connecticut been able to log on Pottermore yet? Yesterday was the first day for Day 1 entrants. Email Jessie.Sawyer@patch.com to share your experience if you have gotten in. http://patch.com/A-lhk2.” The link led to my column, “Five Pottermore Early Access Wait Coping Tips.”

Mid-post on one of the pages, I was redirected to the Facebook log-in page. When I logged in again, a message popped up stating that my access to posting on Facebook page walls was to be blocked for 15 days because my account was allegedly posting spam and irrelevant content on other pages. The message carried a warning that further abuse could warrant my account being permanently removed. The links were also taken down from the other Facebook pages.

My first thought was concern that I would not be able to post on the Avon Patch Facebook page, but soon found that the block luckily only applied to posting on Facebook pages for which I was not an administrator.

Later in the day, I tried to post on a coworker’s Facebook page to congratulate him for his one-year anniversary with the company, not out of defiance because I honestly forgot. A message popped up reminding me that access was blocked for 15 days because my account was making “too many spammy and irrelevant posts.”

I Facebooked (I don’t think this verb has made it into Merriam-Webster, but it has become part of my generation’s vernacular) an acquaintance of mine Tuesday who works for Facebook about my problem after I was not able to find a contact to reach out to about the issue (unfortunately, searching Facebook’s help pages does not help when you have your account in Spanish in attempt to practice the language). He immediately wrote back to me and forwarded my message to Facebook’s corrections team and said I should expect an e-mail from them.

The e-mail did not come until Wednesday. A woman named Tia, no last name given, from the user operations team wrote that “Facebook has limits in place to prevent behavior that other users may find annoying or abusive. These limits restrict the rate at which you can use certain features on the site.”

The e-mail further stated that “unfortunately, we cannot provide you with the specific rates that have been deemed abusive.” That troubled me because it would seem only fair that people blocked should know why they are blocked.

The Facebook representative gave me further advice about “what to keep in mind” if blocked from a Facebook feature, stating “this temporary block will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.” Wait, I thought it was 15 days. Anyways, here’s what she wrote:

• “Attempting to use this feature while you are blocked can extend the block.”
• “We cannot lift this block for any reason, so please be patient and refrain from using this feature for a few days while waiting for this block to be removed.”
• “Once you are allowed to use this feature again, you must significantly slow down or stop this behavior. Further misuse of site features may result in more blocks or your account being permanently disabled.”

I have read Facebook’s terms of use policy over and over, and the only “limit” I could ascertain that was even close to posting links to news articles on other Facebook pages was “you will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications (such as spam) on Facebook.” A news article is not spam and the link to my column was not commercial, so it does not apply.

I looked to see if there was a limit to how many times you could post successively, or one link even, as I suspected that posting the same link and message over 10 times in a row on different pages was the reason a flag went up on Facebook’s end. There was no restriction listed.

I do understand why Facebook has limits and every website does need to monitor the content posted on it closely. I’m not faulting them for that, but Facebook’s refusal to reverse a feature block mistakenly enforced for accounts that are following the rules does not seem right. The request to “significantly slow down or stop this behavior” once my ability to post on Facebook is restored also was not helpful because I still have not been notified what was wrong about my Facebook activity.

I couldn’t find anything in the terms of use about a “limit” to the feature either, so I e-mailed the Facebook representative back Wednesday asking if she could explain what “limit” she was referring to so that I would know in the future.

Tia responded Thursday, again stating that “this temporary block cannot be lifted for any reason” and reminding me that misuse of the Facebook page wall feature could result in the being blocked again or my account being removed. She also sent me a link to the conditions of blocks.

Other Similar Cases

I am not normally one to complain, but the reason for me to even bring this issue up is that I am not the only one experiencing this.

Kathleen Ramunni, editor of Hamden Patch, wrote a column this morning about how many animal rescues posting notifications about homeless animals on other rescues pages also have had their accounts blocked for 15 days for supposed “spamming.” She wrote that it is common practice for rescues to do this to increase the chance that the pets will find a home.

The rescue employees that Ramunni interviewed also posted a lot in a short time frame on other Facebook pages prior to their suspension.

Animal activists drafted a petition asking Facebook to reverse the block. The petition had 6,000 signatures by Wednesday night. A page on Facebook for the cause called “Don’t Suspend Our Animal Rescue Accounts,” had up to 11,000 members as of Wednesday evening.

I would post a link to this column on their Facebook page to let them know I’m experiencing the same problem, but I’m forbidden.

Carol Schatz of Angel Paw Animal Advocacy told Hamden Patch that she knows of 140 accounts suspended recently for the same reason, 60 of which were animal rescues.

As a result of the Facebook suspensions, many animal rescues are switching over to Google+ for their social networking as they try to find homes for animals, Judi Falbo of Helping Connecticut Canines told Hamden Patch.

“We are all still awaiting some word from the powers that be at Facebook,” she told Hamden Patch, ”as we don’t know for sure what we are doing or what we did wrong.” 

Me neither, Judi. I guess I will be waiting for more than my early access to Pottermore in August, ironically, as I count down the days until Aug. 31 when my access for posting to Facebook pages will be restored.

In the meantime, I can still post on the Avon Patch Facebook page, so I will continue to share any Avon news updates with my Facebook readers.

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