= Facebook profile face dump
{c}
{tag=Ciro Santilli's data projects}
In 2016 Ciro made a script downloaded <Facebook> profile pictures.
This was possible at the time without any login by using a 2010 profile ID dump from originally announced at: https://blog.skullsecurity.org/2010/return-of-the-facebook-snatchers since profile picture access was not authenticated.
The profile ID dump was downloadable through a <BitTorrent> named `fbdata.torrent` of about 2.8GB, mostly compressed. Doing:
``
find . -type f | xargs sha256sum | sha256sum
``
on Ubuntu 20.04 gives:
``
2c9a739c9c5495e38ebab81fc67411b7c6562f139dcb8619901a3f01230efdd5
``
This dump widely reported e.g. on <Hacker News> at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554558[].
At some point however, Facebook finally started to require tokens to view public profile pictures, thus making such further collection impossible, e.g. as of 2021: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v9.0/user/picture[] mentions:
\Q[Querying a User ID (UID) now requires an access token.]
This is also mentioned e.g. at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11442442/get-user-profile-picture-by-id[]. This major privacy flaw was therefore finally addressed at some point, making it impossible to reproduce this project.
Ciro downloaded 10 thousand of those pictures, and did facial extraction with: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13211745/detect-face-then-autocrop-pictures/37501314\#37501314
He then created single a video by joining 10 thousand of those cropped faces which can be uploaded e.g. to <YouTube>. Ciro later decided it was better to make those videos private however, as sooner later he'd lose his account for it.
<Companies> like <YouTube> blocking this kind of content is the type of thing that makes companies take longer to fix such gaping privacy issues, and is a bit like <security through obscurity>. A video makes it clear to everyone that there is a privacy issue very effectively. But people prefer to hide and look away, and then 99% of people who know nothing about tech get their privacy busted by actual criminals/government spies and never learn about it.
But now that Facebook finally fixed it, it's fine, no need for the video anymore.