There’s a simple Facebook hack that lets you unravel entire networks of people as you navigate around a user’s “private” friends list. However, I must warn you, the easy way to do this will take a long time to complete, and the fastest way to do this requires a bit of programming knowledge. Sounds a little funny, I know.
Step 1: – Use Facebook “Graph Search” to Find a Probable Friend
Mark Zuckerberg’s friends list is set to private, and for good reason. However, to run this hack, we’re going to need to find at least 1 friend of his who has a public friend’s list so that we can look at their friends.
Using Facebook’s Graph Search feature, we can type something in along the lines of People who work at Facebook and live in Palo Alto, California, and then get a list of likely friends of Mark Zuckerberg.
Step 2: Compare Mutual Friendships with This URL
Being the VP of Advertising & Pages at Facebook is important so there’s a good chance the user Bosworth is friends with Mark Zuckerberg, and since his friends list is public, he makes a perfect candidate for our hack. To verify Mark is his friend just search his friends list.
To view their mutual friends, and to see who exactly is friends with Mark, we need to insert their account ID names into the following URL:
https://www.facebook.com/HiddenProfile.Name/friends?and=PublicProfile.Name
Account ID names can be found at the end of the URL of their Facebook pages. In this case, Zuckerberg’s is “zuck,” and Andrew Bosworth’s is “boz”.
After we insert the account IDs into the URL, we get this:
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/friends?and=boz
Step 3: Repeat Step 2 Ad Infinitum
It appears that Zuck and Boz have 143 friends in common. That means we at least know 144 of Mark Zuckerberg’s friends now.
To unravel his entire list of friends, we will need to repeat Step 2 with any of these mutual friends, and then do it again with those mutual friends, and so on until infinity.
The Short Way: Automating the Process with Code
CyberInt’s Shay Priel has automated this whole process using his open-source code available on GitHub. Dubbed “Facebook Hidden Friend Crawler,” the Python script is for educational purposes only and will weave through the individual’s mutual friends, of mutual friends, of mutual friends, etc., until it compiles a complete list.
Although it has only been tested on Ubuntu, feel free to run the program yourself if you’re up for the challenge. Then, let us know the results!
