A Facebook crawler based on interaction simulation and MHRW-DA

Author

Zhefeng Xiao ; Bo Liu ; Huaping Hu

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. Sci., Nat. Univ. of Defense Technol., Changsha, China

fYear

2012

fDate

29-31 Dec. 2012

Firstpage

2041

Lastpage

2044

Abstract

Data acquisition is a precondition to conduct online social network (OSN) research. Based on the interaction simulation, we have implemented a Facebook crawler with unbiased MHRW-DA (Metropolis-Hasting Random Walk with Delayed Acceptance) algorithm, which can obtain the complete friend list of a Facebook user. We make an analysis on the crawled dataset, and find out that (1) 34.2% of Facebook users have changed the default privacy setting, implying that the awareness of privacy protection of Facebook users has been greatly improved; (2) the percentage of female users in those that have changed the default privacy setting is higher than male by 16.8%, implying the awareness of privacy protection of female users is much higher than that of male.

Keywords

data acquisition; data privacy; social networking (online); Facebook crawler; Facebook user; MHRW-DA; default privacy setting; female users; interaction simulation; metropolis-hasting random walk with delayed acceptance algorithm; privacy protection; Facebook; crawler; privacy; simulation; social networks;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Science and Network Technology (ICCSNT), 2012 2nd International Conference on

Conference_Location

Changchun

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-2963-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCSNT.2012.6526320

Filename

6526320