Broadband Tech > Security > Security > Startup Finds Fame After Tangling With Facebook

reply to PeeWee

Re: Startup Finds Fame After Tangling With Facebook

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Here’s one you may not “like.”

Imagine having a friend on Facebook who matches up your privately shared data to a public voting record -- then flags you for more frequent campaign calls and contacts.

That’s exactly what the Democratic party is doing. The upcoming presidential campaigns are eager to get their hands on the treasure trove of voter data that 900 million users have voluntarily posted on Facebook. Enter Social Organizing, a new tool developed by Democratic activist group NGP VAN. Using it, your friends can log in to Facebook and tell the service about you. You can then be added to a caller database, pinged for ads and harassed during the entire election.

Rob Enderle, a consumer analyst, says most people don’t even know that their Facebook can be mined in this way, for example. They might not be aware that, when you friend someone on Facebook, you are giving them permission to use a tool like Social Organizing and that you might start getting more campaign calls.

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Anyone tracking users should know that a lot are not trackable , for a number of reasons.

I think they are headed down the tubes...

»www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/sto···719840/1

reply to Name Game

»www.facebook.com/pages/-Pffffttt···18992963

reply to siljaline
BTW..not over yet..was just killing time until both parties finish their investigation

"Earlier this week, the story of a startup company who discovered the majority of their ad clicks on Facebook came from bots made big news on the web. In fact, the story even took on a bit of a life of its own, something that Limited Run’s co-founder Tim Mango told us he wasn’t too keen on.

After the story broke, Facebook investigators began to look into the matter to see if they could confirm Limited Run’s claims. Now, the social networking company is telling Wired that they’ve been unable to find any proof or receive any evidence of the excessive bot clicks.

Limited Run has since deleted their Facebook page in protest, not in response to the bot clicks, but in response to another issue about a name change, but more on that later.

In their first blog post about the issue, Limited Run said they noticed something was amiss very soon after they launched their new site with Facebook ads.

“A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site,” writes the Limited Run team on their blog.

At first, the team assumed there was a problem with the analytics program they were running, not Facebook. They switched their analytics programs a few times, but continued to notice the same problem: only 15% to 20% of their clicks came from actual human beings.

They then created their own analytics program to watch the site and saw no changes in the amount of legitimate clicks. To corroborate their own findings, they then created a page logger. Same results.

The team was able to estimate the number of bots by watching the JavaScript. Most users have JavaScript enabled by default and never turn it off, as many users have no reasons to turn it off. However, a browser visit without JavaScript is often indicative of a bot, therefore, the team concluded nearly 80% of the ad clicks they had paid for were actually bots.

In a statement to Wired, Facebook has said they’ve yet to be able to prove these claims.

“We’re trying to work with Limited Run to investigate these claims,” a spokesperson said, “but we haven’t received any data yet to support these claims.”

Limited Run has confirmed they’ve been talking with Facebook, but isn’t saying much more.

“We have been in contact with a number of people at Facebook since this started,” said Mango. “They are researching the issues we had. This is all I can say.”

Mango told redOrbit the reason they decided to cancel their Facebook ads and remove themselves from the social network was due to the way they were treated when they tried to change their name. In the beginning, Limited Run was known as Limited Press. Though they changed their business name elsewhere, Facebook wouldn’t let them change it on their page.

“There were issues with our ad campaigns that we ran over the course of about a month, yes, but our biggest gripes were the lack of customer support from Facebook about those issues and when an employee told us we could only have our page’s name changed if we committed $2000+ a month to advertising,” Mango told us.

In the end, it seems Limited Run only wants to put this matter behind them. “We don’t want to be known for this,” Mango told Wired."

»www.redorbit.com/news/technology···-080412/
redOrbit (»s.tt/1jVLO)
Limited run blog..
»blog.limitedrun.com/post/2834162···ook-page

My take on it..still think limited run is wacko on all this and faceback also does not want to be "known" for this run..so they are still digging to find out the truth.
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Gladiator Security Forum
»www.gladiator-antivirus.com/

My information is a few days old and is therefore not current at this time.

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Four days ago, a music e-commerce site on Long Island ignited a minor controversy by claiming 80 percent of the clicks on its Facebook advertising came from bots. But Facebook says its investigators haven’t received any evidence for those claims, despite an ongoing effort to get to the bottom of the ad mystery.

The Long Island business, Limited Run, said in a post to its now-deleted Facebook Page that it repeatedly saw signs of bots clickings its ads. The first came from an analytics service, which could only verify 20 percent of the clicks Facebook reported sending to Limited Run’s website. Then Limited Run tried other analytics services, which posted similar results. Limited Run then built its own analytics service, which indicated 80 percent of the clicks came from programs not running Javascript, as would be expected from a bot and rare among a human running a web browser.

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reply to Steve

No, the meaning of my comment is obvious to anyone with some common sense. Since I know you possess a fair amount of common sense I have to conclude that you are deliberately playing dumb (like Steve).
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When governments fear people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. Thomas Jefferson

Nature abhors a cliche.

Meanwhile, in other sheeple news...

reply to EGeezer

reply to dave

"Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident--the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society."

Have you had your fill today.

“The White House and its allies are focusing on the campaign spending of outside quasi-political organizations -- most notably American Crossroads -- in the final weeks of the 2010 midterms, trying to turn these groups into bogeymen for voters.”

For me, it's not about bashing or defending Facebook. I'm not a fan of Facebook, but this case goes beyond liking or disliking it. I've never trusted it as a user, and the IPO was reminiscent of others I'd seen that turned out to be barely legal scams. But again, the issues go beyond that.

To me, the topic has been about investing and a company's business model, and how that business model can rely on technologies subject to bots and abusers who hack the system for profit and/or sabotage of the target companies. Therein lies the security aspect of this topic.

The fact that none of the sparring parties has been able to conclusively establish whether or not the clickthroughs are from legitimate users or bots is a troubling signal to those who depend on them to drive sales and revenue.

I suspect that this would have to take on the aspect of a criminal investigation.

A thorough investigation would require a combined effort between Facebook and ISPs of the originating IP addresses of systems generating the clicks. That may also require search warrants and subpoenas to the various parties to obtain the addresses, monitor their activity and possibly fingerprint and probe those systems.

It could even involve getting warrants to seize some systems for forensic analysis to determine activity and information on C&C servers controlling the alleged bots doing the clicks.