Facebook Scraping, Still a Privacy Disaster

Nearly two years on from the revelation of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, you’d hope that Facebook has taken steps to stop bad actors from exploiting data that we share online. While Facebook has taken some of these steps, one loophole still exists. It’s a loophole which allows bad actors to see incredibly private information about users, information that the user may not share with their closest friends. That loophole is scraping.

What is Scraping?

Scraping is simply the act of taking public information from websites. By public information, we’re talking about the sort of information that’s accessible to anyone who views the site. If you wanted to store weather data, you could scrape a weather site. If you wanted to store sports results, you could scrape match reports. If the data is publicly available, chances are that you can scrape it.

In the above examples, you could scrape the data manually. That is, you could visit all the pages whose data you wanted to store, and copy it into a file. This isn’t how scraping is normally done however.

Typically, people code bots which scrape web pages for them. These bots can visit a huge number of sites and monitor them 24/7, to ensure that they capture any data which is displayed on these sites.