How to View Private Facebook Profiles

Your 2nd approach is clearly spamming the email provider and facebook system. I wonder how such an article can get published on MakeUseOf.

yeah seriously, this just seems like such a wrong thing to do, and for MakeUseOf to show how to scam people into believing that someone is not who they really are is so wrong, shame on you Ryan Dube for posting this, and specially shame on MakeUseOf for letting him post this!

Bravo Ryan!! I think it’s an excellent article, it’s clearly not written with any harmful intentions. I think it’s a good thing to educate readers about social engineering and the psychology behind internet security. Looking forward to more quality articles.

Wow. First Jimmy posts an article containing the worst Torrent advice ever, then Ryan posts about “Becoming a hero” by following the inefficient and fearmongering Amber Alert system, and now we have Ryan (again!) effectively telling us “How to scam your way into someone else’s Facebook profile”

What the hell is going on? Is 2009 the year MakeUseOf becomes Bad Advice Central?

Yeah, I don’t think this was a good idea for a post. I think most people could have already figured it out (I purposely haven’t responded to people JUST BECAUSE I knew it’d give them access to my profile), and those who couldn’t, probably shouldn’t be given such easy-to-follow directions.

Wooow, good job!

Thanks for your information . I did it and it works

Actually, this is a GREAT article that points out a serious flaw, not in Facebook itself, but human nature.

By doing this, the author has shown us that one of the things we can do to protect our “private” accounts is to query the person in question.

For example, let’s say the name of the Friend we have added goes by the name of “Sid” and some other person is trying to convince us that he is Sid.

Step one is to send a message off to the original “Sid” account and see if there is a response (give 24-72 hours leeway).

If there is no response from the account, we can also try sending an email to an account we know belongs to the real Sid (or if you don’t know the email account, you can ask one of your other friends who may have this information to do so).

Before I get flamed, yes, you can also be in a situation where “Sid” is on vacation, hasn’t told anyone, hasn’t logged into his account in, say two weeks, and you add the false Sid.

One thing you could do, is remember NOT to publish information you do NOT want other people to find out about you on the internet.

There is zero “absolute” security on the net.

Yeah, this is just wrong, what an all time low for Make Use Of. Very sleazy sham-wowish article. Time to delete MUO from my reader, sorry.

Yeah, what an all-time-low for Make Use Of. This article is down-right creepy….sleazy at a sham-wow level. Time to remove Make Use of from my reader, sorry.

lol lol that is so funny. I don’t even give a toss if I can’t see other’s profile, if they live in my country and i know them then i add them, other than that, all my facebook friends are people i know, I just don’t add anyone alive

This was a poor article, and an clear error of judgement by Makeuseof. People don’t need to read the pathetic little scribbles of some weird guy who spends his time figuring out to dupe girls into being friends with him – not even in real life, but in internet-life.

Sure, if there was a real security angle the article might be useful, but there clearly isn’t: “hot girls”, “axe-murderers” and “cheating” don’t really justify the need.

Every article on Makeuseof impacts on the site’s brand strength and its profile, and publishing junk like this reflects badly on what is usually an excellent, useful and informative site. I understand why others have commented that they’re going to stop reading MUO…

@MakeUseOf-Team: I don’t understand why you support letting someone post this kind of article.

This is way too weird. The author is apparently not aware of psychological damage which stalkers or persons alike can cause on other people.

Sorry guys, i’m deleting my feed subscription.

I don’t get all the hate. It’s basically an article about social engineering applied to facebook. And an entertaining one at that.

I bet that if the platform wasn’t facebook, but something less widely used or even just theoretical, the holier-than-thou crowd would’ve kept silent and/or maybe even applaud.

Thanks for the article Ryan.

Good article Ryan. I didnt know sending and email opened my account to who it was sent to. The second method was also thought provoking. Another thing to look out for. I cant believe so many people are bad mouthing this article. No doubt liberals. Trying to kill MUO and this country. I cant stand fragile people who think their entitled to this or that. FB isnt national security.

This is really an uncool post. If you think you are being informative in a good way, you are absolutely not.

I would have to check twice before I accept a friend on FaceBook from now on. This technique is almost like commiting fraud.

With the kind of large reader base MUO has and most with FaceBook accounts, this is a wrong palce for this information to be published.

Aibek, I hope you would screen the articles more carefully from now on. Seriously, this kind of information doesnt deserve a place on MUO which is looked at as a blog with good and informative tech realted stuff.

Wow, How completely unoriginal, Social engineering, big woop. It takes no computer skills whatsoevver to do it. Makeuseof what were you thinking when you let this post go through? Did he hold a gun to your head or did he make another fakebook profile instead of going outside again?

hmm.. Now, i’ll have to watch out for things like this.. don’t like this one bit.

My facebook is private for a reason…

I’m not sure if this works anymore, but the default setting used to be that people in your same network can view your profile. Most were unaware that this was the default and very few people actually change their settings. So, if the person was in the Los Angeles network, as an example, all you had to do was join the LA network and you could see tons of profiles lol I’m sure they would have patched that up by now, but it worked a charm at one point!

The “right” article to publish would’ve been “protect yourself from Facebook scammers.” This? Well, do you know that you can get anybody’s phone number without even knowing their name? You can ask them, and sometimes they’ll accidentally give it to you.

Obviously, be careful in doing things like this. It wouldn’t surprise me if some intrepid District Attorney was able to spin something along these lines into a wiretapping, fraud, or identity theft case.

Of all the things to get upset and/or become moral about on the internet and people go after this (great) article.

My guess is that those people are upset because you exposed some of the techniques they use on facebook

Don’t people realize that there’s nothing illegal about getting someone to add you as a friend on a PUBLIC social network. Even if you may be deceiving the person to get added they still have to willingly accept the friend add. If you create a facebook profile only to make it private then why did you even take the time to create it in the first place? To me that’s kinda creepy.

Stop being so uptight people. What a bunch of whiny libs.

Why all the negativity? Indeed this was TERRIBLE article in all regards, but the mere fact that it has got so many people worked up shows what a BRILLIANT article it is.

Its like the half full half empty question. You csn look at this article as a wrong way of gaining access to private data, or you can see it as a way to protect yourself from falling for such “scams”.

These methods hold within them the seeds for these own ‘destruction’. We can sit here and talk about who is cancelling their subscribtion, but lets face it, now thanks to this article, you would definately think twice when you get a friend request on facebook.

GREAT ARTICLE,….. Poor Excution.

hmm, with all the crap of the MUO hijack you would think that Make Use Of would be totally negative towards scamming. Own goal make use of, another reader you dont value dropping you from his reader.

Aibek the gloating tone of the article contradicts your reason for it being published, and the arrogant responses of the author also back this up.

I like this article- I dont think anyone will be stupid enough to actually do it, but most of us who reads it now will be aware of this trick for the future…so in terms of cost benefit it pays of for the community.

I don’t think anyone’s disagreeing that it’s a loophole, and an important issue. The mistake was to approach the issue with an article like this – gleefully focusing on how you can con people, rather than on how you can protect yourself.

There’s little skill in writing an offensive article that gets people talking. Sadly, for me, the only thing this will make me check more often is whether or not I should bother reading MUO articles.

This has moved MUO from “reliable” (a rare attribute), to “unreliable”.

To those who found this either “uncool” or intriguing but a little too much work, I just wrote a similarly-themed article on my blog that shows you how to view the full-size picture of anyone’s Facebook profile picture. It’s pretty easy to do and allows you to be only mildly sketchy rather than fully

Check it out here.

I also appreciate this. People are bothered because it probably is a very effective technique, which reinforces the value of publicizing it, which is the only way to stop it from working. I tend to be highly suspicious of facebook ads and generally ignore ones from people I don’t have another method of contacting directly, but a lot of my friends aren’t.

Right now, communication is a commodity, which makes privacy less valuable. In a few years when all of these networks are commonplace instead of novel people will start to realize the value of protecting their information. The number of people who put common security question answers in their Facebook and MySpace profiles (or even on slightly more secure sites like friends-locked livejournals or blogs) astound me. We need more articles like this, propagated more thoroughly, if people are to understand how publicizing their information sets them up for deception and abuse by even mildly savvy online predators.

I think the second part is not ethical. At least how it is presented. I think that if you had presented it as “hey this is a flaw in facebook…this what a hacker might do”. Having said that, I believe it is good to see how hackers think and how social engineering is done, to watch out for it. Thanks.

Article just made me giggle. The thought that someone would go to ALL that time and trouble to deceive someone into opening up their Facebook profile, instead of spending half of that energy going out into the real world and actually making a real friend. Funny stuff!!!!

Does this still work? AFAIK, even a Facebook user’s friends is not viewable to strangers.

There’s no originality or insight here. This is one of those articles thought up after the fifth beer. It’s simply juvenile. Now, had there been a real hack, that would have been worthwhile.

lucky I don’t use face book and I never will use but anyone can write what they want +++

On the face of it, I didn’t like the article. It had an amoral tone. I still think it’s important to read things like this, to comment on them, and to not unsubscribe from a feed or blog just because an article rubbed you the wrong way, or because a certain writer did the same.

This is not so much a how-to, imo. It’s a heads-up or a reminder for everyone, that the traditional hustle has not gone away, it’s only moved online.

Also, anyone who is in favor of what the author is advocating, should ask themselves if they’d want to be on the receiving end of such a hustle. That is, how would you feel on finding out that someone had been doing this to you.

I think this is a wonderful article. I won’t be trying it out but if anyone does try to view my account without permission, I can know see some of the signs: a friend adding me twice. All I have to do is confirm that my friend (first account) has actually lost his or her password.
Also, I had no idea that by responding to a message, the other person can view my account… And for sure didn’t know there were so many hacks out there to access Facebook accounts. Amazing!
Thank you for a great article, it was quite eye opening

I think this is a great article and great idea. Yeah it might be snooping or just to satisfy a little curiousity. If someone just wants to peak to see what is going on in someone else’s life and its more harm then good to send them a friend request and they are not being mean or hateful, where is the harm. If you don’t have things you want people to know then you shouldn’t join any internet sites where there is a possibility for someone to gain access to your information. FB is a networking website to connect with people. I think it is silly to have private profiles.

Great Post! Glad I found the site!

This article identifies a security issue. Everyone complaining seems to think that this article was written so that stalkers could get into private Facebook accounts. Wrong. Point the finger at yourself – this article was written so that you know how stalkers scam in order to get access to your Facebook account.

Do you honestly think that stalkers don’t already know this information?

This information is for you to protect yourself from stalkers.

i just want to know if the girl i love is still with her boyfriend or not.

is that so difficult??

i was looked about some facebook stuff and i faid really GOOD website Guides on

http://facebookgeeks.blogspot.com there a lot of tricks just 4 facebook

I love how so many people have been complaining about this being shown on this website – yet why one earth would they be reading the article unless they wanted to find an underhand way of reading someone’s facebook profile? Hypocrisy methinks!

There is a sense of paranoia and hypocrisy that comes with this topic. Privatized profiles were originally designed to deter pedophiles from accessing minors. Now, it’s gotten out of control. If an adult has a privatized profile, it defeats the purpose of social networking, where people get to know each other in a way they otherwise might be unable to.

The only time it would be sensible to do that might be when searching for employment, because HR Managers are using social networking sites as part of the background checks. You see, even a “harmless” picture (adult beverage in hand, girl in bathing suit, lesbian kissing her partner, etc.) can be viewed by a potential employer as a red flag, if they personally don’t agree with the behavior depicted in said photo.

Other than that, hiding yourself it comes off as quite contradictory. It’s anti-social behavior and hypocrisy at best. A person can look at others’ profiles to learn something about them and react accordingly, but that same person closes themselves off from others. It comes down to a lot of people not wanting to take responsibility for their actions and their postings. We’ve all wanted to know what someone was like and tap into their personality as a way to be informed. People like to throw around words like “creepy” and “stalkerish” to dismiss the views and actions of others, even if those views and actions are something the accuser does or has done in some point. There’s no criminal intent in looking at an online profile, Googling someone, and so on just to obtain information about someone. It’s what you intend to do afterward that the term “stalkerish” might apply. If you’re gonna call courtship (a man e-mailing a woman or looking at his crush’s profile to see if she’s single or compatible), then you’d have to look at yourselves in the mirror, because we’ve all been curious to know more about someone who tickles our fancy or get in touch with one who got away to see if time heals wounds. Also, if you’re gonna the viewing of profiles only as “stalking”, then you’d have to accuse cops of that, the FBI, private investigators, Human Resources Homeland Security, and so on who survey, watch over, and search for people in person, through search engines, and online profiles. In fact, I’ve seen news stories about criminals posting info on Facebook and MySpace and getting busted because of it.

The bottom line is that, when accusing someone of that, it conveys the person has intent to harm in a criminal manner. There are people who are genuinely being terrorized by someone and we can’t have knuckleheads who don’t handle their personal business taking away from those who are in imminent danger of being beaten, raped, and/or killed. Looking at a webpage is benign and unless the person is posting info that can be used to survey and or contact the person with dangerous intentions (example: the mother who created the profile which led to a teen’s suicide), then let’s not take away from the people who need help from crazed fans and those out to commit actual criminal acts.

Most of these “stalking” situations are social situations where the parties involved are not communicating nor acting properly. If one or both parties did something differently instead of being irresponsible and running away from their personal issues, then the conflict would either be resolved or there would be no conflict in the first place. Not handling your business like an adult and getting a bunch of not-so-informed third parties (regardless of it’s a friend or a D.A.) just makes a seemingly bad situation a million times worse. Also, authorities have to deal with these petty personal squabbles while those who really require the help and protection are either not getting it or their claims are not being taken seriously because of the crying wolf others do.

We live in a curious society, period. Why else do we have this stuff like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and so on? There’s nothing wrong with it, as long as your intentions aren’t malicious or criminal in nature. The National Enquirer, Inside Edition, TMZ, and other trash media are controversial in terms of the photos they take and the accuracy of the information they report (which sometimes lead to libel and slander lawsuits). We as a culture crave information about something or someone and that’s better than being assumptive and not thinking and acting for ourselves. As long as you aren’t expressing interest in harming anyone, quench your thirst for knowledge. Some people are just more PC and hypocritical than others. They want to look at profiles and see what an ex or anyone else for that matter is up to yet when they’re the searched or contacted one they’re defensive.

Social networking sites are meant to be forums to socialize. To dismiss others methods of socializing is just exposing one’s behavior to be probably no different at one point or another. If you have to privatize it, then you probably shouldn’t have one or at least strip it down and learn to express yourself better. You just may very well get shot down for that $100k salary position, and no, your potential boss didn’t “stalk” you, as they have the right to know what type of person they might be hiring and they don’t have bad intentions with their background checks. Hell, I’ve heard of women doing credit checks on guys before first dates, so consider yourselves lucky.

Your article is so flawed. If you pretend to be the ‘friend’ of your target and try to add the target by saying u lost your password, of course the target will simply check her actual friend’s real profile for any recent activity or simply call up her actual friend to verify. The target wld not be that stupid to comply to your request by impulse. In the event that anyone loses his/her password, he/she wld just click on the ‘forget password’ link to retrieve password via email; most ppl who lose their password wld not create an entire new account.

The people who complaints about this article are egocentric, and they only see one point of view. For example, weapon can use to kill people, but it also can save your life. It’s up to you, what you’re going to use it for. People can use this article to do whatever they want, and it can be positive or negative. Before you compliant, think about it again. How the hell you get into this article. Did you just google for it? or Did you click on something else that similar to this article? It’s impossible to pop up in your PC.

I like Psychology and I learn some stuff from you Ryan. Thank you!!!

Cool!!!!!!!

Sweet!!!!!!!!!!!

Everyone else sucks… lol!!!

hi ryan, is there any way to see facebook last activity of my non-friends. i hope u will help me out.
btw that was a nice article i’ve ever found on net, and …
***cheers***

I really don’t wanna judge ryan dude, as the article is still considered to be an effortful contribution, seeing there were some sounding academic reference involved. But I was seriously expecting some techniques more orthodox than that. Make-use-of-the-friends-around-your-target fits right in MUO haha.

I personally wouldn’t go that far to peak into someone’s life. And I don’t think there will be another proper way to do it.

But good effort Ryan, maybe just not on this site

Hi Ryan, found this article great. While there is some moral problems, 75%+ of people will probably either fail or not end up doing it, and I fall in that category. For the people who post negatively on this, you went to the article in the beginning, it did not go to you. For those who simply looked at it to post a bad review, do something better with your time.

Now, for my content.

The part 2 of this, saying I lost my password, has its obvious problems.

1. If they log on and see these things, it is plainly shown what comes up next.

My solution, is you play another role. Instead of
“I lost my password” you can say “some person has hacked my account and they are horrible. They will imitate me and try to get to you. Whatever you do, ignore them.” Adjust this to be appropriate. You could even put forward “they are stalking me so don’t communicate with me because it just helps them”.

The massive advantage of this is that because the original account owner might object on over the fake one (particularly to the person who you were originally trying to target), in this method it is sorted with.

The problem with this is that by not taking the stalker route, they might contact the person who you are imitating. Alternate forms of communication which are reliable are used.

Please comment as this is my first post and I have enjoyed it.

This might have worked at one time. But does NOT any longer. Private profiles will not have a view friends tab. Please hang up and try again.

making a fake facebook profile is completely against facebooks “term’s of use” and will get your main account banned. they will track your IP and delete all accounts associated with it.

I think this is great! I will definitely try this. Thank you for publishing!!

hey, good one there Ryan. doesn’t matter what they’re thinking about you or, how many boos you get from readers. you just made most readers a bit more conscious.

what if you can’t view their friends either??

I have a crazy situation a girl stole my pics off facebook but she’s set to private so I can’t see what exactly she is saying or how many of my pictures she has stolen. I reported her to facebook but they have done nothing so far.

this is the best article ever, it really works, thanks man,
your the best

you are a genious!!

Finally a solution. Great article. I have been trying to view a private myspace and facebook page for a few years now.

I have a valid reason to need to see a private facebook page, I am not trying to get anyones personal info, or post negative comments. My fiance’s baby’s mother lives in another state and keeps putting old pics of her and my fiance as her main profile pic trying to portray that they are together and a “family”. They were never in a relationship and she got pregnant on purpose and deceitfully. My fiance only took the pic with her and the baby, for his daughter bday, my fiance tucked his away in his daughter memory book for her to have when she gets older, this biatch on the other hand, couldn’t wait to turn around and use the pic in a deceitful way, and “acting” like they are together so all her friends or anyone who looks at her profile will automatically asume they are together, so she won’t look stupid being a single mom. WE have contacted facebook and myspace numerous times and reported her and they do nothing! My fiance is upset because the pic wasn’t in that context and he doesnt like his pics online and doesnt even join social sites and never gave her permission to post his pic, especially in a false way.

Then she sets her pages to private so its like “what do you have to hide, and what are you saying to all your friends about my fiance that we can’t see?

I just want to see if she is being truthfull, and saying the guy in the pic is her daughters father, or if she is trying to act like she is in a real relationship. We live in VA and her in NJ and to see what other pics she may be posting that we can’t see.

what are we supposed to do when myspace/facebook doesn’t help victims, we have to take it into our own hands as we have tried for years to get help the right way.

Before we confront her we want to know the truth of her intentions. If she is really being truthfull, then ok who cares about the pic, but if she is lying then that is slanderous and she needs to be confronted and stopped.

You should not be allowed to post pics of other people without their permission. YOu should have to blank out others faces and only show yours unless you have permission.

That is so humiliating to me if my friends or family end up seeing her profile pic and it looks like he is cheating when they don’t even see each other, when he goes to NJ to visit his daughter, I am right there with him.

So how do i get this to stop without an article like this. I have no malicious intents, however the person who page I need to view has malicious intents towards me.

No one should be allowed to post any pic they want, if the other people in the pic wanted their business on the internet they would post it theirself.

We should be able to contact facebook and myspace and request a user take our pics down if we don’t approve.

For those with negative comments, there are far worst things in the world that people are doing, and information they are hacking than trying to view a dang social network page, BIG DEAL!

you shouldnt create the page if you don’t want to risk the chance of anyone seeing your personal information, there will always be glithes and security loopholes so don’t chance it, if you are so pressed to keep “private” about everything, if you don’t post it, no one can hack it!

Thats why my fiance doesn’t deal with the internet other than email or our home based business because he doesn’t want his pics or personal info out there so she shouldn’t be allowed to do it for him!

THanks again, I can’t wait to try this.

Hey, great article!

Do you have any other suggestions for part two, since a person shown in a public search without a profile picture might just indicate that their picture is set to private (and not that they don’t use facebook often, though that’s possible too).

Would it be too risky to copy the pictures/info of a friend’s public profile?

Look forward to testing this out.

hehe well done man, total respect to you i like the way you think!

Great article, you have just reaffirmed my view of the intellectual capabilities of the majority of the negative response ‘facebookers’

Dear Ryan,

Can’t we think from the friend’s ID that show when focusing on the friend’s picture?

By the way its a federal crime to impersonate some one… Im 95% sure… atleast its illegal to make a facebook as someone else… I wouldnt be worried about anyone careing much but you never know

That’s very clever, but I have to say I would call the cops if I realized someone impersonated my friend.

Yeah im not badmouthing this im just saying im pretty sure this already around and that you CAN get reported its called Phishing

I thought of this idea too. But the person i want to spy on has their friends list set to private. DAMMMMMMM!!!!

wowW.. gr8 stuff.. hey, do u still use facebuk??? i wanna add U…

wowW.. gr8 stuff.. hey, do u still use facebuk??? i wanna add U… or anyone alse who wants to.. my name is “Furqan Sattar”

I am actually the victim of having my Facebook profile “hacked” in this way. Does anyone know how to remove the intruder?
The person who portrayed themselves as one of my friends has been adding creepy comments to my photos, but when I go to my friends list they aren’t there to delete. HELP!!!!

This “trick” would only truly work on a person who has hundreds or thousands of friends. Not someone who keeps tabs on everyone. While I might be one to try something like this, I know it would never work on me. Takes one to know one Also, I think eventually they would realize the profile was fake (unless they are one of the aforementioned types) so you might as well get the info you need while you can.

As a computer security major, I found this article interesting from a security perspective. I’m glad to know that Facebook addressed the security vulnerabilities in a reasonable timeframe, it brings me comfort as a Facebook member. I was unaware that my profile becomes temporarily available by simply responding to a message from a non-friend. I’m thankful for that knowledge.

Regarding the moral lashings that I viewed in the comments above, you don’t deserve them for posting the article. I find the article informative and I will now be guarded when viewing messages and friend requests.

http://www.facebook.com/Sophie%20Katende#/profile.php?id=1424511629&ref=ts

help me on this one