Please beware that results returned by Facebook are neither complete nor consistent.
Later we will learn how to find any user’s Facebook ID. The functionality is available at the URL ID1 &node= ID2, where ID1 and ID2 are the numerical ids of the two Facebook accounts. This issue has been known for years and, despite the recently increased attention on users’ privacy declared by Facebook, it is not considered a concern by the company.
This is because Facebook also offers the “Mutual Friends” function, which shows friends that two accounts have in common, provided that at least one of them has their friend list visible to the current user. Other people will see only mutual friends.
If you set this to Only me, only you will be able to see your full friends list on your timeline. If people can see your friendship on another timeline, they’ll be able to see it in News Feed, search and other places on Facebook. Remember, your friends control who can see their friendships on their own Timelines. In the settings page it also displays the following warning: Reconstructing a hidden friend listįacebook lets its users decide whether to display their own friends on their profile page, as well as to whom. The authors or are in no way responsible for any misuse of the information or the code provided. All the information provided in this and related articles are for educational purposes only. Please beware that Facebook Terms of Services prohibit scraping without permission: therefore you should not use any scraping tool without proper written authorization. We will also see how it is possible to plot the graph using the tool Gephi and propose a way to identify sub-communities within the graph.įinally, we will apply the procedure to a practical example scenario: we’ll retrieve some of Mark Zuckerberg’s hidden friends, plot them on a graph, identify sub-communities and export the final graph in a format that can be explored with a browser: here is the final result. We will present a way and a tool to automate the procedure in order to maximize the number of hidden friends that can be found.įurthermore, using the same tool we will see how to build a network graph of the relationships among the friends found, in order to represent the friendships between them. It is known that by exploiting the “mutual friends” function, is possible to bypass the visibility restrictions under certain conditions. Facebook gives its users the possibility to restrict the visibility of their friend list.