So Facebook currently have a new offering in beta form, and its called ‘Facebook Graph’. Woopie Doo I hear you cry, but it may actually be something to sauce up your Social Networking OSINT a little more if you are a social engineer.
The aim of Facebook graph as far as I can tell is to allow more powerful searching of all the juicy information that Facebook holds on their products, sorry I mean users. The theory being if you want to know a good restaurant in a certain area you can do a simple search query “Places people like to eat in London’ and it will respond with a load of recommendations based on the information / recommendations / likes of your friends, and their friends friends. The same can be done to check who of your friends or associates live in a certain area, have certain hobbies, work certain places and such like. The plan according to the video from the Facebook founder says it will just be early days and they will offer more over time with regards to search options. From looking at Facebook Graph I see the following options to search against:
My Friends, Photos of My Friends, Restaurants Nearby, Games My Friends Play, Music My Friends Like, Photos I have Liked, Groups My Friends Are In, Apps My Friends Use, Movies My Friends Like, Current Cities Of My Friends and so on.
I think this gives a little insight to some of the information available. The aim is to provide more personal intelligent information for users of Facebook and the results in theory should be more relevant than that of a search engine. Interestingly though, there is an option at the bottom to use the search query on the Internet, and this uses Microsofts Bing Search Engine.
So I think this service will help with further identify that circle of trust between people, common interests, favorite locations and alike. Some of this information is accessible today, but it can be like a needle in a hay stack, perhaps this makes that needle a little bigger 🙂 No doubt there will be privacy configurations, but at the same time I cant help but think that those settings wouldn’t be able to restrict to much information, as without the information there is no product. Time will tell I guess, but certainly something worth following as it develops in my opinion.
If you have not heard of Facebook Graph check out the Facebook release info.
And if you are a developer, you might want to check out the Graph API.
[…] Facebooks new offering Facebook Graph looks to be a potentially awesome tool for social engineers from an OSINT perspective. Intel gathering gets even more specific. […]