A quartet of researchers recently proved that a handful of “socialbots” could be used to exploit data from Facebook that users would otherwise believe to be hidden from the public, PCWorld reports. Different than traditional online robots, these socialbots are designed to gain access by pretending to be friends of real users only to mine important information such as email addresses and phone numbers.
This study comes after the hacker group known as Anonymous alleged the military would move to monitor social networks like Facebook using similar fake personalities.