There are many similar questions on SO already, but things have changed a lot since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the tightening of users' privacy, so I want to clarify the context: how can I find a Facebook profile (i.e. a Facebook user object) using an email address in the year 2022?
I understand that the results may be limited to only users who have opted to make their profiles public, but I am not seeing anything relevant in the Facebook API documentation, e.g. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/user/ has nothing about performing a SEARCH. Is this type of action no longer possible? It's been a few years since I had to use it, but the Facebook API is now completely unrecognizable to me. Surely scraping the HTML from a search-result page is not the way to accomplish this task?
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On my site, I allowed members to register the address of their Facebook page to automatically display their public posts.
It worked very well. I had the Page Public Content Access permission.
But the authorization, after several years, was withdrawn from me. According to Facebook, it is only approved for statistical purposes. Facebook recommends the "Oembed read" permission to me. All right, I got it. But she does not meet my needs !
According to their documentation, it would not be possible to extract information from Facebook outside of oEmbed.
Ah ? However, by searching on Google "Facebook to rss", we find many websites which, without even registering, offer this. This website, for example. So how do they do it?
I wrote it to Facebook support, who answered next to the question.
So how do you do it? How can I offer my members to automatically publish the publications of their page on our portal?
I need to initiate searches on facebook marketplace from my application on the user's device. This needs to happen on the user's device, and as the facebook user associated with the user using the application, to avoid getting blocked by facebook. As far as I can understand, this cannot be achieved using facebook's OAuth login and accessing the facebook information that is accessible through it.
Another hypothetical way that comes to mind, is to use the token that the user uses to login into facebook itself, though this one sounds frankly illegal.
tl;dr is there a way to run a search and retrieve the results on facebook marketplace as a user on a user's device?
I found your question on SO, and spent a good bit of time researching this, as I wanted to know the answer myself. Unfortunately, as best as I can tell, this is not possible through any official APIs. It seems like they may have once had something like this, as I found several links to FB API documentation that looked promising. But, the links all rerouted back to the Graph API homepage. I found a couple of references to the big data breaches FB has suffered in the last couple of years as possible reasons why their APIs were retooled and locked down.
I found several Facebook developer posts with questions about a Marketplace API where there were either no answers after months or years, or an official Facebook moderator posting a response like "This is a great idea, we always want to improve, use this form to submit your idea" and so on with no follow up.
I also found at least one SO post within the last 18 months where someone in the comments claimed to be able to post products to FB, but I think this was related to the Business Page Product Catalog, and is not what you're looking for. This is more like if a car dealership or something wants to post a new car for sale that's tied to their FB business page.
The Graph API allows for some decent searching and edge traversal but it is all related to posts, pictures, feeds, etc., and nothing related to the marketplace. Facebook pushes their Marketing APIs so heavily that it was tough to filter through that noise. And, of course, all of marketing apis are geared toward creating ads.
I found some Facebook information around API URLs looking like https://graph.facebook.com/search=terms&type=some_type that was very promising. But the type options seem to be limited to adcountry, adeducationschool, adeducationmajor, adlocale, adworkemployer, adkeyword, adzipcode, adgeolocation, and audienceinterest. And, as I dug deeper, it appears this is related to finding targeting groups for creating targeted posts. Nothing for marketplace.
I think that the answer, unfortunately, is that there are no offical FB APIs at this time that will allow querying search results from the Facebook Marketplace, much less provide enough information to reproduce a listing to display on a 3rd party app.
Hey guys, this is more of a question out of curiosity, but is it possible to get somebody's Facebook page after they have visited your site?
Was thinking maybe a chain of lookup stuff could be used starting with an IP to eventually perhaps get a name and thus that person's Facebook page. I have also heard you can read somebody's web history, is this true?
If you want something, ask for it.
Seriously: you can use Facebook Authentication {instead of|in addition to} your site's registration/login system. It's really not that hard and it's well documented (pay attention to FB's data policies though: what you can do/must not do with the data, how long you can keep it etc.)
When users sign into your app through FB Auth, they must grant your page (temporary) access to their basic profile (at least, I haven't found the way to only use FB Auth for authentication, without granting access to profile data).
On the other hand, if you are planning to track your site's users on FB without their knowledge and/or consent, there's a word for that: "stalking"; in some places, there's even a penalty of law to go with it. In such case, I would recommend talking to a lawyer first - just out of curiosity ;)
I'm trying to grab someones facebook picture from their page while just knowing their email address. I know that the service gravatar.com does this, but a lot of people don't have accounts there so I would like to grab the pictures from facebook. Is this possible? I didn't find anything about this in the developers part of facebook.
Programatically? You may not necessarily have the right to use others photographs. Facebook can because the users have agreed to their T&Cs and uploaded the pictures but I don't think you have any rights concerning the pictures without first contacting the owner.
just a quick look at facebook and i've found that when you are logged in to facebook you can search for users based on email address and that will bring back the avatar. i'd be surprised if neither the api nor the FQL supports this functionality since it seems pretty basic.
+1 evernoob on the legality part. altho it is available to you when you're logged in so i can't see why they'd specifically restrict you.
good luck and let us know the results.
N
I'm a graduate student whose research is complex network. I am working on a project that involves analyzing connections between Facebook users. Is it possible to write a crawler for Facebook based on friendship information?
I looked around but couldn't find any things useful so far. It seems Facebook isn't fond of such activity. Can I rely on the Facebook API?
Update (Jan-08-2010): Thank you very much for the responses. I guess I probably need to contact Facebook directly then. Cheers
Update (Feb-16-2011): A new book, "Mining the social web", just came out. In it, there is a chapter devoted entirely for mining Facebook using Python. Cheers.
You can't rely on the Facebook API unfortunately. To get friend information, you need to use something like friends.get(). However, any Facebook API method that returns user information like this requires that you have an active session key from that user, and generally the way you get an active session key is to have the user come to your Facebook application or page.
In summary, the information you are talking about is essentially private. You can't pick a person from Facebook, get their friends, and get those friend's friends, and so on. To me this is a good thing for privacy, but of course it prevents arbitrary analysis.
I'd throw out the idea of writing a quick and dirty application with some user appeal that you could use for research. If a group like S**t My Dad Says (funny, not really safe for work) can get 120,000 users in a couple of months, you could probably plead your case with a small research application and get a reasonable amount of users.
The problem is that facebook friendship information is typically private and only accessible to friends. It should be a lot easier to build this network on Twitter, if this is an option for you.
As others have stated, this is typically private information. If, however, Facebook per se isn't a requirement, you could use Google's Social API. A snippet from the Google Social Graph API page: "With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful."
Here's an article on using it in Ruby:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/google-social-graph-api-ruby-rails#
This lifecode post provide a basic python script to scrape your facebook friends contact info.
The output of this script, is the profile ID, profile pame, profile URL, e-mail address and mobile/phone number (if provided by friend).
WARNING: This is against Facebook TOS. Use at your own risk.
Info provided for educational and research purposes
http://ruel.me/blog/2010/11/26/scrape-your-facebook-friends-contact-info-with-python/
You can use http://www.facebook.com/directory/ to get the public listed people.