We know what you're doing

http://www.weknowwhatyouredoing.com/

by Kenan • 14 years ago

408 114 14 years ago

weknowwhatyouredoing.com

akozak• 14 years ago

Well no, I didn't. But now I do that you're looking for and publicizing it, I guess?

georgemcbay2• 14 years ago

I'm surprised there isn't a column for people who are reading Hacker News.

This guy for example:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?=743264506

joering2• 14 years ago

or this one http://www.facebook.com/gmcbay

dmix• 14 years ago

His username is his full name and its in his profile with his real email... thats not exactly noteworthy that you managed to find it.

ffmmjj2• 14 years ago

It's kinda scary to see your own facebook profile being posted on HN out of nowhere... =\

Kenan• 14 years ago

That's because you're being redirected back to your profile since the URL the parent posted is incorrect.

georgemcbay2• 14 years ago

Just to set any minds at ease after the initial shock:

The link I posted is just a generic bad id link that ends up redirecting to your own Facebook profile if you are currently logged into Facebook. Anyone logged into Facebook will see their own profile.

The link joering2 posted OTOH is actually to my Facebook profile. But:

A) I don't really care (anything I put on my Facebook profile is assumed to be 1000% publically available information anyway).

B) Turnabout is fair play

modarts• 14 years ago

Haha, my heart momentarily jumped out of my chest when I clicked that.

gfodor• 14 years ago

This is a neat trick and reminds me of MCI codes from the BBS days. Basically, for a lot of BBS software (and usually enabled by default) visitors to your BBS when posting in discussion threads could insert escape characters (like "%UN") which at runtime would be replaced with metadata related to the person viewing the post at that time.

So, if I were to post "%UN's mother was a hamster and father smelled of elderberries" as part of a thread when I viewed it it would say "gfodor's mother..." etc. You could have first name, last name, etc, so with some creative thinking you could post fairly convincing posts that would trick people into thinking you were actually legitimately mentioning them.

I can remember many posts filled with angry replies from random users who went off the deep end when seeing that some random person on the BBS was trash talking them personally. Oops.

Edit: And for the curious, the purpose of these codes was usually for people creating assets for the BBS. For example, when designing your home screen (an ANSI text file, basically), inserting the codes made it so the home screen would reflect information on the logged in user. Usually when enabled the interpolation happened anywhere, not just in user defined assets. (Of course as BBS software got more mature these types of pranks were not possible with default settings.)

inoop2• 14 years ago

My favorite BBS hack was that on some standard RA configs, unless explicitly turned off by the sysop, you could save received messages to disk even if you were just a normal user. This meant that you could send a message to yourself, i.e. 'del . /q /s' (or whatever zapped your dos disk, I can't really remember.), and then save it to 'c:\autoexec.bat' ...

Other fun things where nailbombs, small .zip files that would expand to multiple gigs. When you uploaded those to early RA systems the virus scanner would attempt to unpack them and quickly fill up the entire disk, causing the BBS to grind to a halt.

Kids these days have no idea what they missed :3

yread7• 14 years ago

Funny thing is that when you try to post it on your facebook wall the preview shows your profile. But when somebody else clicks it it takes them to their profile

fchollet• 14 years ago

Previews on FB are loaded and processed in your own browser, and then results are uploaded to FB (to spare server load, I assume).

BHSPitMonkey• 14 years ago

I use PHP every day. I understand how this happens. I've known about this particular trick for years.

... My heart still stopped.

yread7• 14 years ago

Searching for '743264506' reveals that it is actually quite an old trick. And the poor chap whose facebook profile number it is doesn't seem to be a geek so he probably didn't invent it

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

What?

It isn't anyone's profile number. It's a random number in a broken profile URL.

instakill• 14 years ago

Oh you sneaky bastard!

talhof8• 14 years ago

I'm also a programmer, and I know how it works but I got to admit you freaked me up for a while :-)

stuaxo2• 14 years ago

OK, that was disconcerting to click.

stuaxo2• 14 years ago

Lol

normalfaults• 14 years ago

I wonder if there is a list of other sites like this?

slig• 14 years ago

See also: http://openbook.org/

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

Here are some more interesting terms courtesy of a TechCrunch article about FacebookSearch (now defunct) http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/14/your-public-facebook-status...

“playing hooky” "don’t tell anyone", "rectal exam", "stupid boss", "HIV test", "control urges"

mathewsimonton• 14 years ago

Great work and also this is a cool tool, makes me think of bing.com/social.(does Google offer something like this?)

I would like to see a basic search implemented into weknowwhatyouredoing, though I understand its purpose as is.

I'd also really like to see a region-based search option in one of these tools (beyond hashtags on Twitter, etc.)

stfu• 14 years ago

Reminds me on the who-is-not-at-home syndication from Facebook and Twitter. Even so these are scary, I really think they provide excellent privacy teaching moments. Hope you are going to keep this up for some time and enhance it with other categories.

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

In case it's not immediately obvious (no visible sign, even on hover), clicking on the people's names will take you to their facebook profiles.

bob_kelso• 14 years ago

Hmm, looks like they removed this feature. It at least won't work for me (in neither chrome nor firefox).

It is fairly easy to get a link to the profiles however:

The urls to the profile-images look like this: "https://graph.facebook.com/[facebook profile id]/picture"

By replacing "graph" with "www" and removing "/picture" we get the url to the profile.

lukevdp3• 14 years ago

I can't believe people are still publicly posting stuff about their bosses. Surely there has been enough press coverage about people getting fired for fb/twitter antics

megablast• 14 years ago

Most bosses do not have the time, wherewithal or care enough to do this. There is nothing wrong with people blowing of steam.

lukevdp3• 14 years ago

>>Most bosses do not have the time, wherewithal or care enough to do this.

Agreed.

>>There is nothing wrong with people blowing of steam.

And each to their own, but it's easy to make a post private instead of public, and doing so seems much more prudent to me.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

I think this is so naive. Sure a "good" boss probably won't be snooping on his or her employees. However, I'm pretty sure most bosses are humans and humans tend to snoop on each other

csallen• 14 years ago

Au contraire, regardless of whether or not it's wise to diss your boss online, the last thing we need more of is mass knee-jerk reactions to information over-reported by the press.

paganel• 14 years ago

> I can't believe people are still publicly posting stuff about their bosses.

It's a free world. People should be allowed to say whatever they want on whatever medium they want (as long as it's not hate-speech etc.)

raquo• 14 years ago

It's also free in that the boss can fire you if he feels like it in many places.

lukevdp3• 14 years ago

I'm not saying they legally shouldn't be allowed to (I doubt you will find anybody here that thinks that). I'm just saying it's a stupid thing to do

kmfrk• 14 years ago

People said stupid things in public before social media. :)

dasil0032• 14 years ago

Well according to the Gervais principle, there are two likely possibilities here. If it's a Loser insulting his Clueless boss then he probably has little to lose and probably enjoys the risk of his boss finding out while sharing a good laugh with his friends. On the other hand if it's a Clueless insulting his Sociopath boss then, well, there's probably a good indicator of why he's stuck in the Clueless caste.

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

I can see this blossoming into a very titalating "Juicy Gossip" like startup involving delving deep into other people's lives.

I own Jussip.com (Juicy+Gossip) hit me up if interested. My contact info(s) can be found on my blog ChrisNorstrom.com

confluence3• 14 years ago

A great example that should remind people that it's probably best to assume that everything they say or do online (offline as well) is now (and forevermore) public. Assume that anything you say or do has the ability to be seen by anyone and everyone around the globe instantly - without any methods of recourse. The genie is out of the bottle.

Hence one should adapt one's own behaviour and act accordingly (that doesn't mean that you should get paranoid - just be more careful :).

Reduce risk and watch what you say from now on.

gonehome2• 14 years ago

I've been saying this for a while too.

There's no such thing as online privacy - privacy is dead.

It's better that the default for most things online is public since any privacy setting is just an illusion of security. Of course there are some notable exceptions to this (encrypted backup services that encrypt locally before backup), but for the most part if it's online and at least some other people can see it - everyone can see it.

adrusi• 14 years ago

using encryption it's completely possible to make any information exchange as secure as it can possibly be without accounting for humans on the other end leaking the information.

EGreg• 14 years ago

Yeah, if you think that, then you should read this :)

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120110469#b

It took me a loooong time to figure out how to do privacy and social networking at the same time, using only web technology. Actually it can't be provably private using web technology because you have to trust the server -- which is why we need this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024164

andreasvc4• 14 years ago

It doesn't have to be that way; it's very easy to lock down your facebook settings to friends-only. I think it's quite ridiculous that that's not the default. This pessimistic assumption you mention where anyone can see everything might be the safest, but it's just not how humans work. When you're surrounded by a bunch of friends (or their status messages), you don't assume the rest of the world is overhearing you as well.

fromhet• 14 years ago

I believe that when people say that everything on the internet is in the public domain they imply that even private data is subject to hackers and such. And if someone got root of Zuckerbergs cellar server (or, wait, somethig) they would be able to do what they wished with our data.

confluence3• 14 years ago

You are right about that option. But I find it prudent to always reduce the chance of a type 2 error and increase the chance of a type 1 error (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081972). It is best to assume the worst and trust nothing whilst acting probabilistically than to assume perfection/trust and act deterministically.

Hence, in this case, if you assume everything is public, you reduce the harm that can come to you when the trust you have in a service fails you (as it may well do). Just like an investor - take on risk, minimise uncertainty and price catastrophe correctly. This gives you the best of both worlds - risk priced in proportion to reward. You can have your cake and eat it too - if you only take a slice and no more.

parktheredcar• 14 years ago

As other readers have mentioned, your data is still owned by Facebook and subject to malicious intruders and the like. I just wanted to add that without any malicious intent, Facebook could intentionally or accidentally change your settings so certain information you had set to private is now public, without your consent and without any warning. Remember when Google exposed everyone's contacts through Google Buzz[1]? It's easy for someone to underestimate the difference between what you consider private data compared to what they do.

[1] www.businessinsider.com/warning-google-buzz-has-a-huge-privacy-flaw-2010-2

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

In principle it has always been so - whatever you do leaves an permanent imprint in people and things around you. It's just that the Internet is a new, much more efficient way to navigate and explore the Great Web of Causality. So what was true just in principle, now became true in practice.

imgabe• 14 years ago

The other option is to arrange your life such that you don't have to care what other people think about your status messages.

Not necessarily easy for everyone, but much more satisfying in the long run.

treetrouble4• 14 years ago

What am I doing? Not giving a fuck about who is hung over or takes drugs

farnsworth• 14 years ago

It's not a research tool... you're missing the point.

treetrouble4• 14 years ago

You're missing my point. That information is uninteresting to me no matter what the purpose of this site is

jrochkind1• 14 years ago

Until I read the comments I didn't get what this was supposed to be --- ghostery for the win, blocks Facebook Social Graph and Facebook Social Plugin.

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

Right but the data is still being collected via public postings on Facebook etc

briandear• 14 years ago

This is freakin awesome. Nice work!

barbs• 14 years ago

Reminds me of youropenbook, which doesn't exist anymore :(

stephen272• 14 years ago

should include twitter as well

iamdave• 14 years ago

You know what? Use that same GET method from the about page, mine for certain words, display analytics on a dashboard next to a stream and you've probably just put a few social media "consultants" out of work.

/dastardlyGrin

Henwys• 14 years ago

I find it odd that people are surprised by things like this. The information is very public.

andreasvc4• 14 years ago

Maybe because they never consciously chose to make it public; that's simply facebook's default and IMO it's counter-intuitive that social interactions are made public.

chrischen• 14 years ago

Sad how most of these people fail to form a coherent sentence.

pyre• 14 years ago

Impressively they handle unique well enough. It still caught, "I hätë my böss" under "Who wants to get fired?"

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

peterwwillis tweets "I LOVE MY BOSS, HE'S THE SMARTEST, I CAN'T WAIT TO WAKE UP EARLY AND FIGHT TRAFFIC!!!"

Am I doing it right?

dasil0032• 14 years ago

Sycophancy is more effective in person. You could waste a lot of time like this without getting your nose brown at all.

intended2• 14 years ago

the phone number column is really bad form.

intended2• 14 years ago

Does someone actually think having visible phone numbers put up by unaware people scraped is a good thing? What am I missing here?

johnchristopher2• 14 years ago

Reading the comments I understand that it grabs public facebook data if you are logged, right ? Since I am currently logged and can't see any of my data it means that my facebook profile isn't public (or at least the data this page fetches aren't public) ?

saraid2162• 14 years ago

No. I viewed this on a browser where I'm not logged into Facebook.

johnchristopher2• 14 years ago

Well I think I am totally missing the point then.

The page doesn't display any info/statuses related to my fb profile or any of my fb friends. From my point of view it is just displaying random fb results obtained by keyword related searches performed against the fb public data accessible via fb API. As far as I am concerned and aware of nothing in my profile is public.

daviddi• 14 years ago

Haha: Who's hungover?

Murray Heather Not Hungover AT ALL, I love these mornings!

gurraman• 14 years ago

Another interesting column: "Who's out of town?". I wonder how burglers use social networking.

Deestan• 14 years ago

> I wonder how burglers use social networking.

Allegedly, they do pay attention to tweets from people they can find the home address of.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8789538/Most-burg...

praptak• 14 years ago

I have some doubts about the site's disclaimer: "I cannot be held responsible for any persons actions as a result of using this experiement."

If someone gets fired upon a comment you took out of context and put under "people who want to get fired" then I wouldn't bet the above statement as your best line of defence in a lawsuit.

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

Agreed. I up voted the link, but I think the same message could have been conveyed with garbled names and numbers.

jahewson• 14 years ago

That's a terrible disclaimer. You can't just disclaim your way out of statutory liability.

There's probably nothing to worry about with re-publishing an already public fact, but the cases where errors are made e.g "I'd hate to be my boss" filled under "People who hate their boss", the casual reader may be confused (some might say mislead).

The solution is just to keep people informed, so your disclaimer may say something like: "the information on this site is automatically collected from public posts to Facebook. Posts are classified automatically, and as such our classification of their sentiment may be inaccurate."

Also, just in case one of the Facebook posts says something defamatory, hate speech, etc. you can gently remind people that you didn't write, edit, or approve of the content so "are not responsible for the content of messages".

leke• 14 years ago

If you click one of these profiles, you can't see those messages, so how does this guy do it?

icoder• 14 years ago

This could have been done a little more sophisticated. Now it seems nothing more than some basic text searches.

For instance two people saying "Not Hungover AT ALL, I love these mornings" and "Hungover !" respectively are both in the hungover section. And in the doing drugs section there was one guy who was happy he actually quit.

andreasvc4• 14 years ago

That's a nontrivial problem to solve. Consider "I avoided becoming hungover again!". In other words, you'd have to do a full semantic analysis and get the scope of negations right. I hear that current sentiment analysis techniques use a heuristic by looking for a nearby negation.

josteink• 14 years ago

None of the posts have any likes. Now I don't feel so bad about my own ignored facebook posts ;)

ps2000• 14 years ago

99th percentile of people who either don't care or are not able to care about privacy

Jgrubb• 14 years ago

Why use jQuery 1.3.2?

nathanb• 14 years ago

Needs an RSS feed for data mining purposes...

dreadsword• 14 years ago

I'm guessing the site is making an API call to pull each user's thumbnail. Remember, your capped at 350 API requests per hour per APP ID. You should cache image links to avoid all the broken image icons.

godisdad• 14 years ago

Hilarious. Reminds me a bit of http://pleaserobme.com/

russtrpkovski• 14 years ago

Some 18 Year Old Made A Site That's Going To Get People Fired For Using Facebook

http://www.businessinsider.com/lock-down-your-facebook-priva...

We know what you're doing

Related Stories